Boeing 787 takes full flight to S.C.

Boeing told employees Thursday morning it will consolidate 787 Dreamliner production in South Carolina, abandoning the original final assembly line in Everett.

The formal announcement that Washington state loses the airplane it worked so hard to secure 17 years ago was no surprise, after the news broke Tuesday.

In a message to employees, Seattle-based Commercial Airplanes CEO Stan Deal said the move to consolidate the work in North Charleston, S.C., will be done by “mid-2021, according to our best estimate.”

As he shared the news, Deal acknowledged that “the 787 is the tremendous success it is today thanks to our great teammates in Everett. They helped give birth to an airplane that changed how airlines and passengers want to fly.”

Then he cited the collapse of the airliner business “through the unprecedented global pandemic,” to give Everett employees the bottom line:

“To ensure we can be effective in a market that will be smaller in the near-term ... we made a decision earlier this morning to consolidate 787 production in South Carolina after months of detailed and thorough study.”

“This strategy affects many teammates so it was important we took the time to run a rigorous and thoughtful evaluation,” Deal wrote. “For months, teams studied options, engaged all of our stakeholders, including unions, and considered a number of factors including logistics, efficiency and long-term health of our production system.”

“It became clear that consolidating to a single 787 production location in South Carolina will make us more competitive and efficient, better positioning Boeing to weather these challenging times and win new business.”

In a news release later in the morning, Boeing said that its “analysis confirmed the feasibility and efficiency gains created by consolidation.”

A big factor in that analysis was that the aft- and midfuselage sections of the Dreamliner are assembled in separate buildings in North Charleston and so can be rolled over on the ground to the final assembly line.

For Everett production, those huge sections have to be airlifted across the continent on Boeing custom-built Dreamlifter cargo planes. And for the largest model of the 787, the 787-10, the midfuselage is too long to fit inside the Dreamlifter, with this model built only in South Carolina.