Boeing has restarted 737 production and intends within days to resume assembly of 767s and 777s, saying it is bringing its Pacific Northwest facilities back online after halting production for nearly three months due to a machinists’ strike.
The machinists returned to work in November, but Boeing says it held off on resuming output as it prepared its operation, employees and suppliers for a safe restart.
“We have worked methodically the restart factory operations in the Puget Sound region after the strike,” Boeing said on 10 December. “We have resumed 737 production in Renton.”
The company expects to recommence 777, 777X and 787 production “in the days ahead”, it adds; Boeing assembles those jets in Everett.
The restart is a major milestone for Boeing, which has been haemorrhaging cash amid a production stoppage that began on 13 September when members of the 33,000-strong International Association of Machinists & Aerospace workers downed tools.
Boeing and the union reached a deal to end the strike on 4 November.
“We rooted our operational restart within our operational safety management system,” the company says. “There were specific plans to identify, evaluate and mitigate potential risks at each stage of the restart.”
Those efforts included requiring employees to complete training and certifications and ensuring tools were properly calibrated, the company says.
Boeing is working to “resume production at pre-strike rates”, it adds.
The airframer is not more specific about production rates, but sources at the company say 737 output is proceeding at a very slow pace.
The company’s 737 output had been significantly depressed even before the strike owing to the January in-flight blow-out of an Alaska Airlines 737 Max 9’s mid-cabin door-plug, which investigators traced back to a Boeing quality oversight.
That event prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to cap Boeing’s 737 production at 38 jets monthly, though the company was not producing aircraft at anywhere near that rate.
Boeing does not disclose month-specific production figures, but does do so for deliveries.
It delivered an average of only 25 737s monthly in the first nine months of 2024, and many of those jets were aircraft that had been previously produced and were sitting in Boeing’s inventory.
