By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

Vought Aircraft Industries’ fuselage plant in North Charleston is “among the riskiest, if not the riskiest” of Boeing’s major suppliers for its Dreamliner 787 project, a company official said earlier this month.

Despite that admission during Vought’s Nov. 9 third-quarter earnings conference call, company President and CEO Elmer Doty said with Boeing’s help, his company would meet the 787 program’s needs.

“Vought’s major focus remains the successful startup of the 787 program, and we continue

to make progress,” Doty said.

Last month, Boeing announced a six-month delay in its 787 Dreamliner program because of a fastener shortage and assembly problems with the first aircraft. Not only is the 787 the world’s first commercial liner made almost entirely of composite materials, it is also the first

Boeing project to rely on key partners around the world to build the revolutionary structures and ship them to Everett, Wash., for final assembly.

Unlike previous Boeing projects, wherein its subcontractors built components designed by Boeing, a production process called “build-to-print,” the Dreamliner project required Vought and others to bear the bulk of the design work for those sections.

Vought’s North Charleston plant has struggled to send fully completed sections to Boeing, Doty said.

“Our challenges are logistical rather than technical.”  “Production of fuselage barrels is going very well, but it is our supply chain that has struggled to deliver parts,” he said.

“This challenge will be with us well into next year. Doty said. But going forward, we’ve got a game plan that meshes with everyone else’s, and we think we can execute it.”

In addition to problems with its suppliers, Doty said Vought effectively had to reconstitute an engineering department from disparate units when it took on the 787 work. Trying to mesh these engineering units, which Vought had acquired separately over time, would have been a challenge in any case, he said, but it was particularly difficult to do so “starting up a greenfield site in a remote location.”

Since announcing the production delay in October, Boeing has replaced Mike Blair as the head of the 787 program, and his replacement, Pat Shanahan, has appointed Scott Stode, a former Boeing vice president of aircraft definition and production, to oversee Boeing’s work with Vought on a range of commercial airliner projects.

Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@setcommedia.com.

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