A Boeing executive has confirmed the airframer will scale back outsourced engineering on the next 787 variant and reduce participation by outside partners on all future commercial aircraft programmes.
Boeing vice president for engineering Mike Denton, speaking on a company podcast, also apologized to his engineering employees for working "so many hours of overtime to get the programme recovered".
Denton's remarks were aimed at the Boeing members of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), a union now entering the final month of negotiations on a new labour contract.
But Denton's statements also reflect Boeing management's broad disillusionment with the 787's once-heralded production system that relied on six major partners in three countries to make vast financial, engineering and production contributions.
"Some of the partners have really struggled to do a really good job of the engineering for those parts," Denton said.
For its part, Boeing mistakenly judged that its partners were capable of participating beyond build-to-print work, and then compounded that error by failing to track their progress.
"Our engineers and production workers are basically correcting the problems that should have never come to us in the first place -- problems that are the result of the partners really not being done," Denton said.
Boeing is now negotiating with those partners to take back some of the detailed design work on the 787-9, he said, but did not elaborate.
Boeing executives will apply lessons learned from the 787-8 experience on the next commercial aircraft.
"We will probably do more of the design and even some of the major production for the next new airplanes ourselves as opposed to having it all out with the partners," Denton said. "We see that as building on lessons of the 787, taking advantage of the parts that were really good, but doing some course corrections so that we can not relive some of the harder lessons that we have experienced recently."
Boeing has reached a tentative settlement with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), but the nearly eight-week-old strike will continue until union members vote on the contract on 1 November.
Meanwhile, SPEEA's engineering workforce entered tense main table discussions with Boeing on 28 November in Seattle. Denton acknowledged Boeing faces "challenges" in adapting to the negotiating style of SPEEA's new executive director, Ray Goforth.
Boeing was surprised by SPEEA's demands to conduct all negotiations in the month-long main table sessions, rather than at the subcommittee level.
"That's new to us. We're willing certainly to work with them to make that happen. Obviously we have some concerns about whether there's enough time to get it all done at main table or not," Denton said.
SPEEA, however, appears still far part with Boeing management on the issues. A mid-afternoon electroic message by Goforth on 30 October read: "SPEEA ends today's meeting early citing Boeing intransigence."
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news
