Boeing is planning to announce its intent to buy the 787 operations run by Vought Aircraft Industries in North Charleston, S.C. from the Carlyle Group, according to a report by FlightBlogger’s Jon Ostrower, which cites unnamed sources.
In the last two years, Boeing has worked to gain control over its supply chain for the troubled 787 program. The purchase may set the stage for a second final assembly line for the new 787.
Once an announcement is made, there will be a week-long transition to shift operational control of the facility to Boeing, the report said.
The transition will draw on the lessons learned after Boeing sold off its Wichita commercial operations to Onex Corp. in 2005, forming Spirit AeroSystems. Spirit is a key supplier to Boeing on the 787 program.
9 Comments
I’m thinking that this purchase is to get a large part of their supply chain problems under control rather than adding a new assembly line.
spirit has/had plans for another building, located where the humane shelter was….
who wants to bet that boeing sells this to spirit too?
About time. If Boeing would have built the entire plane it would be delivered already.
Hmmm… I thought outsourcing was supposed to be the answer to everything???
Controls the bleeding from contracted failures, and also makes sure huge $gains$ by Spirit aren’t replicated in S. Carolina.
Who cares?
This article is just a reiteration of a plan that was made after Vought’s failure to deliver a 787 fuselage section on time. The cause of a major portion of the delay, when fasteners were not available due of over demand, wiring problems because invoices and work orders where in a different language (Italian) and a lot of the work was move back to states. I even heard that several levels of management were replaced by Boeing management during the worst part because of the huge overspending. Other contractors, I know, reported of mandatory 72hr weeks. There was a lot of money being paid out for repetitive work causing huge turnovers.
Now, if Boeing is taking this over, it’s not to build a second site. It’s to finish cleaning this mess up. Who knows the future; maybe they will be doing final assembly there.
Boeing is finally admitting its mistake by this acquisition. When you lose control of the engineering, problems like this arise. This was a mistake made by the business people of Boeing and hopefully other plane manufactures will take note. In the highly regulated and highly technical aviation industry, engineering changes are constantly being made. This is why it takes so long for a plane, like the 787, to be developed.