Boeing offers bonuses to spur 787 catchup in Charleston

Boeing is offering a one-time bonus of 8 percent of a years pay to workers at the 787 Dreamliner plant in North Charleston, S.C., if they can fix the production problems there within the next few months.

To reduce the deluge of work that has been flowing unfinished to Everetts final-assembly plant, managers in Charleston also are reorganizing the myriad jobs involved in assembling the jets mid-fuselage, where the worst bottleneck is.

And Boeing says it has completed the first step in its campaign to control Charlestons production problems: rapidly hiring 1,100 workers, many of them skilled contractors, in the past three months.

However, a big backlog has built up. Last week, the mid-fuselage build teams were just shy of 8,000 jobs behind schedule. At recent rates, thats about 10 days of work.

There are still a lot of wiring issues, and efforts to fix that are taking a lot of manpower and a lot of hours, said a manager in Charleston.

The most recent fuselage sections delivered to Everett from Charleston are those for Dreamliner No. 178.

Boeings latest target, said the manager, is to minimize the work traveling incomplete to Everett by Dreamliner No. 195. That would be within a couple months.

But to me it still feels chaotic, cautioned the manager, who, like other employees cited in this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because Boeing doesnt allow workers to speak without authorization. I dont think that will happen by line number 195.

Meanwhile in Everett, work is still backing up as sections arrive missing not only major wiring bundles but even the brackets that hold the wiring.

According to three people in the factory, work on both 787 assembly lines in Everett slid by two to three days in the past week, despite mandatory overtime through the weekend for many mechanics.

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Boeing offers bonuses to spur 787 catchup in Charleston