Impact of Boeing strike puts brakes on 787 production at partner Vought
Vought Aircraft, which builds the nurse fuselage of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner in a new assembly plant in Charleston, S.C., is slowing the put in the ground within a little to a standstill, and its extension lines have a mind likely be left behind largely idle into next year.
About 170 Vought workers and about 20 contract workers in Charleston will be temporarily laid off Thursday. Only 30 to 40 production workers will remain at the plant, along by more 150 manufacturing engineers, planners and other salaried staff.
That’s down from about 325 Vought employees and 300 contractors this past summer. Most employees in Charleston had completed a year or so working on the airplane.
“It feels partiality we are tearing to our work force,” Joy Romero, Vought’s vice president for the 787 program and head of the Charleston facility, related in some parley. “Our employees were starting to get the learning curve going. We were starting to operate progress.
“I really feel bad we are doing this at this time of the season,” she added.
Romero said the temporary shutdown was forced by the agency of the 58-day Machinist strike, that stopped Dreamliner final assembly in Everett for two months before recently ending.
“Boeing cannot simply ‘form the switch on’ and be back up to speed immediately. It will take them time to ramp upper part up,” Romero told employees in a memo Monday. “Obviously, Boeing cannot absorb our 787 fuselage sections beyond the capacity of their own assembly line — which has not been moving.”
On Oct. 24, Vought stopped fabricating more of the carbon-fiber composite shells of the rear-fuselage sections, which had backed up inside the factory as estranged as Dreamliner No. 19. It also cut overtime and let go hundreds of temporary contractors who had been working to help catch up on previous program delays.
Now, Vought will besides pause greatest in number assembly and systems-installation toil.
“Up to now, we have … continued to work on our fuselage sections, getting them ready for delivery to Boeing,” wrote Romero. “Now we must reach our temporary shutdown to include most of our assembly operations.”
Romero before-mentioned the small team of production workers left will separate into three teams.
Two order install engineering changes on the rear fuselages of airplanes 5 and 6, the next two to be shipped to Everett when the final-assembly operation in that place gets unclogged.
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