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Vought plant completes first 787 fuselage section
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
It was a modest physical move with gigantic implications not only for the workers at Vought Aircraft Industries’ North Charleston plant but for the Lowcountry as a whole.
On May 8, workers on the plant’s morning and afternoon shifts gathered to celebrate having completed their first composite sections for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
Although the immediate destination for the 38-foot-long piece of high tech aircraft technology was a mere 200 yards across a parking lot to Global Aeronautica, Vought’s joint venture with Alenia North America, the short journey aboard a custom-made transporter heralded the start of a new era in the region’s dream of becoming home to a thriving aeronautic business cluster.
Even before the large silver section left Vought’s massive building, company officials were already talking about the possibilities to come for the industrial campus directly adjacent to Charleston International Airport.
Ted Perdue, vice president of Vought’s 787 Division, said an expansion of activity on the land is something he expects to see, given that North Charleston and the Lowcountry in general have proven to be “such great places to live and work.”
“Right now, the footprint of our existing buildings and parking lots, and the like, only cover about 100 of the 240 acres we have here, and a number of our suppliers have already expressed an interest in being located closer to our facility,” he said.
“Another possibility is you might see more Vought buildings rise here over time. While I think we’ve already got all the buildings we need for the 787 project, I could envision our opening more facilities here as we garner contracts for other projects.”
Pacific air routes
Boeing currently has more than 550 orders for the Dreamliner, making it the most successful launch of a new commercial aircraft in history. This first section will comprise about 23% of a 787 that will be delivered to Japan’s All-Nippon Airways on July 8, company officials said.
The assembly, comprised of two separate sections making up the last passenger seating area of the aircraft and its first cargo hold, was wrapped and prepared for shipping at Global Aeronautica. Within days of its arrival there, it was loaded onto the specially designed cargo carrier, the Boeing Dreamlifter, and flown to Everett, Wash., to be joined to the other sections of the aircraft.
“Today is an historic milestone for Vought,” said Perdue, as the section was wheeled behind him. “Our company hasn’t done anything on this scale in quite some time, and I couldn’t be prouder of our team.”
The sheer volume of orders to date and those expected to come in the future, guarantee a bright future for the plant, Perdue said. All-Nippon Airways alone has ordered 49 more 787s.
“A lot of customers means a lot of jobs to come here to the Lowcountry for years to come,” he said.
The current aircraft in production is one of three models of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner that will eventually be built. The 787-8, as the first model is known within Boeing, will carry 223 passengers in three classes of seating with a range of up to 8,500 nautical miles.
The aircraft has been designed to use about 20% less fuel than similarly-sized aircraft, and travel at a top speed of Mach 0.85, similar to today’s fastest wide bodies. Named for Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, a Mach number is the number of times the speed of sound at object moves.
Locally trained workers
About 145 people at the North Charleston facility had a direct hand in building the section as did hundreds of engineers at Vought’s headquarters, said Lynne Warne, the spokeswoman for the plant.
Plant workers, almost all of them hired locally and trained at Trident Technical College in North Charleston, are at various stages of completing four more fuselage sections, Perdue said.
When the 342,000-square-foot plant reaches full production in 2011, an estimated 375 people will work at the facility each day, in one of 20 projected assembly bays or behind the scenes in the plant’s 70,000-square-foot “clean room.”
The center piece of the clean room is the 787 autoclave, which is 76 feet in length and 30 feet in diameter and similar to a pressure cooker that melds the sections together.
The structures are made of composites known as carbon fiber-reinforced plastic. When the aircraft are completed in Washington state, composites will make up nearly 100% of the 787’s skin and about 50% of all materials in the plane. No commercial aircraft has used composites on such an extensive scale.
Workers in North Charleston are building the two aft sections of the jet. Aft fuselage section 47 measures 19 feet in diameter and 23 feet in length. It is the last passenger section of the 787. Section 48, measuring 14 feet in diameter and 15 feet in length, includes the pressure bulkhead and is the first cargo hold section of the aircraft.
Of the sections made in North Charleston, about 80% of the material is purely composite, while the remaining 20% is mostly aluminum.
While Vought has more than 30 years experience in dealing with composite materials, mostly with military aircraft, Perdue said he has been impressed with the high-quality of the composite materials being produced at the plant since it opened for business in June 2006.
“Trident Tech has done a tremendous job setting up and administering our training program,” he said.
For its first delivery, Vought chose to completely assemble the two aft sections in its building. In the future, the sections will be sent separately to Global Aeronautica’s 334,000-square-foot building for assembly.
The pieces then will be sent on to a new, smaller building currently under construction on the Vought campus to be painted the colors of the airline awaiting delivery.
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.
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