Boeing’s new jet a worldly endeavor
HANDA, Japan — This is an airplane factory. Green-painted aluminum all around, the deafening rattle of rivet guns, the hot smell of metal against metal as scores of workers in blue and white jump suits drill and bolt together the big center wing boxes for Boeing 777s at a Fuji Heavy Industries factory.
Less than a mile away, in this suburb of Nagoya, things are different where Fuji workers are completing an all-new factory for an all-new jet.
Here, big plastic pieces of the center wing box for Boeing’s new 787 will slowly harden in giant pressure ovens, watched over by a handful of technicians. Where holes need to be drilled, a large machine will do it. The pieces will be wheeled around the factory on an automated cart that plays gently tinkling, ice-cream-truck versions of popular karaoke tunes.
No noisy rivet guns. Far fewer workers. Soft, gentle music. This is a new kind of airplane factory. The 787 is the Boeing Co.’s first try at an airliner that will be more plastic than metal.
To build it, Boeing is trying a new method. It has turned over most of the work to its suppliers, and together with them, it has set up a global assembly line, with factories on three continents that will be linked by a fleet of dramatically modified 747 cargo jets.
A company in South Carolina will attach the pieces baked at the Handa plant to sections fabricated in Italy. Then the whole center section will be flown to Everett, where Boeing workers will snap it together with the rest of the plane and install the finishing touches.
To launch the 747, the plane that brought Boeing to Everett nearly 40 years ago, the company relied on The Incredibles: a proud cadre of engineers and mechanics led by legendary designer Joe Sutter.
But to launch the 787, the company’s first jet of the 21st century, Boeing has built an international team led by people named Mark and Giovanni, Hideyuki and Newt.
“The 787 represents innovation in our industry,” said Vincenzo Caiazzo, the chief executive of Alenia North America, one of Boeing’s Dreamliner partners. “The 787 represents a breakthrough in the market. The 787 has also allowed us to build innovative relationships in the supply chain that have never been made in the past.”
Not much has changed
Aircraft manufacturing has not changed much since Rosie the Riveter put her hair in a bun, picked up a drill gun and started building the B-17 bombers that her husband flew in World War II.
Today, airplanes are built by creating an aluminum skeleton reinforced by steel. These stringers and spars are riveted together, and then large, thin sheets of aluminum are fastened on with more rivets.
Each hole is precisely drilled, some by laser-guided machines developed in recent decades, but many by hand, just the way Rosie did. Then each hole is filled with a fastener that joins the parts together.
Once the body sections are done, they’re linked together and Boeing factory workers begin stuffing them with insulation and wiring, windows, hydraulic lines and altimeters.
“You look at the 747, it’s like your grandmother’s quilt coming together,” said Charles “Newt” Newton, the general manager of Global Aeronautica in Charleston, S.C.
All that will change with the 787. The major pieces of the new Dreamliner will be built from composites, a class of materials that includes fiberglass. For the new plane, sheets of graphite fabric will be soaked in plastic resins and then laid down in precise patterns on molds called mandrels. In most cases, the machines doing the job will lay tapelike strips.
After that, the pieces will be “bagged,” placed in vacuum-tight containers, then baked in huge pressurized ovens called autoclaves. The exact cooking times and temperatures are kept secret, but the result is the same: a hard aircraft part that’s lighter and stronger than aluminum.
Each of Boeing’s key suppliers - in Asia, Europe and North America - will use largely the same methods and exactly the same materials, said Scott Strode, Boeing’s vice president for 787 production.
For starters, it’s “a more affordable way,” he said. But Boeing also wants to maintain some control over the way its airplanes are built. “It ultimately has the Boeing brand on the side,” Strode said. “We want to make sure that what we deliver, we understand.”
The new material allows new production methods.
The suppliers won’t rivet together stringers, spars and panels. Instead, they’ll cast entire one-piece “barrels,” whole sections of airplane that are close to 19 feet in circumference and as much as 33 feet long.
As a result, the 787 will have only 60 percent as many parts as its predecessors, Strode said.
Once the sections are completed, other Boeing suppliers will stuff them full of standard equipment, such as the wiring and insulation that go inside each plane, and slap on the primer and undercoats of paint.
Then the three major sections will be flown to Everett, where Boeing workers will attach the wings and engines, fasten the rest of the body together and install the custom equipment: seats, galleys and in-flight entertainment systems.
“What we do today on the wide-body airplanes is bring in a large number of subassemblies and do build-up,” Strode said. But with the 787, “theyre coming in as completely integrated pieces. Instead of thousands of inbound pieces all merging their way to final assembly, you have a few very big pieces.”