BUSAN & SACHEON — The striking topography of Busan draws immediate comparisons to San Francisco with its ivory Gwangan suspension bridge connecting the popular tourist beaches of Haeundae to the Suyeong, where the city’s massive port moves everything from cars and ships to semiconductors and consumer electronics. Busan is the world’s fifth largest port and South Korea’s second most populous city on the southeastern tip of the Korean peninsula, with lush rolling green hills dotted with clusters of near-identical high-capacity apartment buildings.
On this side of the planet, Boeing’s 787’s supply chain operates away from the western spotlight shined on Everett, Charleston, Foggia and Derby. The Dreamliner’s Asian supply chain has largely been hidden from view since 2006, when empty factories were filled with nothing but promise. Today, Boeing holds its Asian partners up as exemplary members of its global supply chain, underscoring the quality, reliability and completion level of structures coming to final assembly.
Tucked back from the taxiways of Busan’s Gimhae International Airport at Korean Airlines Aerospace Division (KAL-ASD), a factory is in a state of perpetual movement as it builds composite components for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. With nearly five years of 787 production under its belt, the company is already building parts for the 62nd 787, which will be the fourth for Doha-based Gulf carrier Qatar Airways next year.
To walk around KAL-ASD, you can see the story of the 787 on display. As they ready for shipment to Fuji Heavy Industries, the upper panel stringers for the Section 11 center wing box display a question-mark shaped bite removed from the once flat edge. That bite taken out of the the stringer serves as the basis for the side-of-body modification that curtailed 787’s first flight in June 2009.
Once performed at final assembly in Everett, and later in Charleston, the side-of-body stringer cutout was done in a cramped, confined phone booth-sized working space that required artificial light and a respirator. That fix, now a simple cut from the stringer at the beginning of production is a healed scar once apparent on the surface, now driven deep into the supply chain far from final assembly.
While a telling sign of the 787’s maturation, the innocuous cutouts are a reminder of how challenging it has been for Boeing to get to this point for the program. As two nodes on a network of suppliers, KAL-ASD and nearby Korean Aerospace Industries (KAI) will have to flow information and parts around the globe three times faster than they do today to meet Boeing’s 787 ramp up by 2013, a daunting task that may be even more challenging than those already vanquished.
This post was originally published to the internet between 2007 and 2012. Links, images, and embedded media from that era may no longer function as intended.
This post originally appeared at Flightglobal.com from 2007 to 2012.