Boeing Co. is moving all of the 787 Dreamliners needing repairs to the West Coast to free up space at its North Charleston campus to build more new wide-body jets.
The Dreamliners that are being repaired are those found more than two years ago to have paper-thin gaps in their fuselage. Boeing halted deliveries of those jets for a 15-month period that ended last August and has been working with the Federal Aviation Administration to clear the backlog in a process called joint verification.
That process has been taking place at Boeing sites in Everett, Wash., and North Charleston, where half of the production floor has been devoted to the repairs.
Everett is set to take over all of the joint verification work in the next few months so the North Charleston assembly campus can focus on raising production of new Dreamliners to five per month by the end of 2023. There are about 95 Dreamliners still needing joint certification work before they can be delivered to customers.
“As we have shared, we are working to steadily increase 787 production to five airplanes per month by late this year, with plans to reach 10 per month by 2025 or 2026 to meet strong demand,” Boeing said in a statement. “As part of this effort, we’re preparing our final assembly facility in South Carolina and planning to convert factory positions used for joint verification work to airplane production positions.”
Boeing, which has been building about three new Dreamliners per month, added the plan “does not require physically expanding the facility.”
It also won’t require additional employees because the company already factored the move in its workforce plans. Boeing employs nearly 6,500 people in South Carolina, mostly at the assembly plant off International Boulevard.
The news follows a pair of big orders for the wide-body Dreamliner, with United Airlines announcing plans in December to buy as many as 200 787s and a pair of Saudi Arabian carriers — Saudia and Riyadh Air — agreeing to purchase up to 121 Dreamliners. Boeing now has a backlog of 592 unfilled orders for Dreamliner jets.
Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun has called the fuselage flaws “minute” but added they’ve “required the most aggressive rework.”
It’s a comment echoed by Stan Deal, president and CEO of Boeing’s commercial aircraft division. He said during an investor’s day last year that the repairs are lasting longer than it took to build the plane in the first place.
Boeing expects to finish the joint verification work sometime in 2024.
