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A new report suggests Boeing BA is back to leaning on business practices that helped cause the 737 Max door plug blowout which threw its year into disarray. The Seattle Times reports that the planemaker is ramping up so-called out-of-order “traveled work” manufacturing on its 777 jets in order to stockpile planes ahead of a possible machinist strike.
The newspaper reports that Boeing is moving incomplete planes along in the production process earlier than it usually would in order to avoid slowdowns at its Everett, Washington facility, and grabbing parts from completed planes that haven’t been cleared by regulators for delivery.
A Boeing spokesperson told the Times that “we continue to face supply constraints across our factories, which drives rework and traveled work” and that “traveled work is a reality for any manufacturing system.”
The company and the 30,000-plus workers represented by District 751 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers are nearing the end of negotiations over their first fully bargained contract since 2008. Members are expected to vote on the agreement next week; if they reject it, a strike could be in the cards.
A scramble to build up production stockpiles is not without precedent. Before the United Auto Workers took on Detroit’s big-three car manufacturers, they rushed to have supplies in place for dealers in case those pipelines were interrupted. (They were.)
After a door plug fell off an Alaska Airlines-operated 737 Max 9 in January, investigators said they believed that part of the reason the incident occurred is because of traveled work. The jetliner in question had jumped from fuselage supplier Spirit AeroSystems in Kansas to a Boeing facility in Washington state ahead of schedule. When a Spirit crew came to Washington to fix an issue with the door plug, either they or Boeing forgot to put bolts back in place keeping the door plug in place.
When Boeing began talks to reacquire Spirit, which had been a Boeing division until it was spun out in 2005, reducing traveled work was a major selling point for the deal.
“It’s a critical supply for us, critical,” outgoing CEO Dave Calhoun told CNBC in March. “It’s our fuselage. When you go out in the factory, the first thing you’re going to see is our fuselage. It’s a Boeing fuselage. Our job is to make sure mechanics and engineers freely travel between the shop floor and the design effort, and that they can help one another every step of the way. Vertical integration is the only way to accomplish that.”
Boeing acquired Spirit for $8.3 billion in July. The 777 fuselage teams are in-house.
