Bert Caldwell: Boeing plan relied on wing and a prayer

Customers, government officials and investment analysts may have been caught off guard by Boeing Co.’s announcement Wednesday that delivery of the first 787 would be six months late. The people building the revolutionary airplane were not.

They saw incomplete components arriving from subcontractors. They knew the plane rolled out of the Everett plant to much fanfare July 8 was a shell. They had warned early on that Boeing’s decision to outsource the manufacture of most large assemblies was wrong.

They are the ones picking up the pieces.

And proudly so.

Tom Wroblewski heads the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers local that represents the workers who for decades have rolled commercial and military aircraft out of Boeing’s Puget Sound-area plants. The 787 was supposed to be different.

Instead of doing most manufacturing in-house, the company put together a global supply chain that shifted work, and risk, to other companies. Although fuselage and wing components had been made in Japan and elsewhere, the bulk of the work on the previous jets, from the 707 to the 777, had been done in Boeing factories.

But workers in Everett were supposedly just going to snap together the 787, reducing time in the plant to less than a week.

Airplane No. 1 has been in the plant for months. And the process, says Wroblewski, looks more familiar than Boeing had expected.

“They are relying on us to do traditional assembly work,” he says.

On July 10, a second shift of Machinists was already in the Everett assembly plant awaiting plane No. 1, which was little more than a mock-up.

They pulled the plane apart and resumed the tasks Boeing had thought would be completed by its suppliers.

Boeing spokeswoman Yvonne Leach did not disagree with Wroblewski.

Not only was work not done when the components arrived, she says, but in some cases Boeing could not be sure what had been done because of incomplete or misleading documentation. And, perhaps worst of all, the Everett plant was not set up to handle the work dumped at its doorstep.

Boeing officials had hoped and, as late as Sept. 5, were telling customers and the public its own workers could get the job back on schedule even though assembly was badly out of sequence. Last week, they admitted that was not going to happen.

But while saying the initial customers will not get their planes on time, they assert that by the end of 2009 they will be only a few deliveries behind. By the time the Federal Aviation Administration completes the process of certifying the 787 for service, Boeing expects to have about 40 airplanes ready. Some suppliers are already at work on plane No. 10.

The analysts who participated in a conference call following the announcement were skeptical and apprehensive. So is Wroblewski.

“Forty-two just seems kind of high,” he says, especially with an airplane built largely of plastic-like composites instead of aluminum.

Wroblewski does not question the soundness of the 787 but understands that unforeseen problems crop up with new technology.

And though Boeing executives characterize supplier woes as start-up issues, not indicators of a fundamental flaw in the new production process, Wroblewski is not so sure. The Machinists warned early on that unskilled workers in supplier plants could not do what union members have been doing all their lives.

“It was very apparent to our members in the plant the airplane was in trouble,” he says. Outsource, he adds, “You lose control of the airplane.”

Now, as Boeing hires more workers — the reason Washington gave the company $3.2 billion in assistance — veteran Machinists from other production lines are getting airplane No. 1 ready for testing.

“We always step up,” Wroblewski says. “Our members are very, very proud of the airplanes they build.

“This is no exception.”

And no surprise.