Well Starley has a type rating already and has flown the boeing plane. I'm sure all the management pilots already have their types. Do they train on their days off too? Do they get paid 2.5 hours of pay?

 

++++++1

BUT, remember this whole 787 debacle started well before Boeing acquired and established the non-union factory in Charleston, SC. You are right though it had to do with non-American workers at all the foreign outsourced locations around the world manufacturing components with very poor Boeing oversight. This is what outsourcing gets you when you can't control your product. Hmmm, I sense that could apply to other companies. Now if I could only think of one or two?

 

Originally Posted by APC225
If Boeing spent less time on trying to get a factory in a non-union ("right to work") state and more time building the plane the old-fashioned way, by American unionized workers, this plane might have 3 years of flying history already.


FYI
Most of the 737 fuselage is made by Spirit Aerosystems in Kansas which is a right to work state. Also most of the 777 fuselage is built in Japan.

 

787 Dreamliner teaches Boeing costly lesson on outsourcing

The biggest mistake people make when talking about the outsourcing of U.S. jobs by U.S. companies is to treat it as a moral issue.

Sure, it's immoral to abandon your loyal American workers in search of cheap labor overseas. But the real problem with outsourcing, if you don't think it through, is that it can wreck your business and cost you a bundle.

Case in point: Boeing Co. and its 787 Dreamliner.

The next-generation airliner is billions of dollars over budget and about three years late; the first paying passengers won't be boarding until this fall, if then. Some of the delay stems from the plane's advances in design, engineering and material, which made it harder to build. A two-month machinists strike in 2008 didn't help.

But much of the blame belongs to the company's quantum leap in farming out the design and manufacture of crucial components to suppliers around the nation and in foreign countries such as Italy, Sweden, China, and South Korea. Boeing's dream was to save money. The reality is that it would have been cheaper to keep a lot of this work in-house.

The 787 has more foreign-made content — 30% — than any other Boeing plane, according to the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, the union representing Boeing engineers. That compares with just over 5% in the company's workhorse 747 airliner.

Boeing's goal, it seems, was to convert its storied aircraft factory near Seattle to a mere assembly plant, bolting together modules designed and produced elsewhere as though from kits.

The drawbacks of this approach emerged early. Some of the pieces manufactured by far-flung suppliers didn't fit together. Some subcontractors couldn't meet their output quotas, creating huge production logjams when critical parts weren't available in the necessary sequence.

Rather than follow its old model of providing parts subcontractors with detailed blueprints created at home, Boeing gave suppliers less detailed specifications and required them to create their own blueprints.

Some then farmed out their engineering to their own subcontractors, Mike Bair, the former head of the 787 program, said at a meeting of business leaders in Washington state in 2007. That further reduced Boeing's ability to supervise design and manufacture. At least one major supplier didn't even have an engineering department when it won its contract, according to an analysis of the 787 by the European consortium Airbus, Boeing's top global competitor.

Boeing executives now admit that the company's aggressive outsourcing put it in partnership with suppliers that weren't up to the job. They say Boeing didn't recognize that sending so much work abroad would demand more intensive management from the home plant, not less.

"We gave work to people that had never really done this kind of technology before, and then we didn't provide the oversight that was necessary," Jim Albaugh, the company's commercial aviation chief, told business students at Seattle University last month. "In hindsight, we spent a lot more money in trying to recover than we ever would have spent if we tried to keep many of the key technologies closer to Boeing. The pendulum swung too far."

Boeing 787 | 787 Dreamliner teaches Boeing costly lesson on outsourcing - Los Angeles Times

 

Your union sold out the 737 pilots by killing scope. Those jobs are now being flown by republic and gojet at $25-60/hr. Say what you want about the CO pilots, at least they maintain jet flying <50 seats.