The world’s largest plane maker is in the midst of its biggest peacetime boom, churning out 20 percent more planes than when the last big cycle peaked in the 1990s.
But it is doing so with one-third fewer workers. In their place, Boeing is turning to robots and outsourcing.
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On the 777 line, the labor savings from automated riveting could be more than 100-fold. One person can run eight sets of robot arms that each do the work of 16 people, replacing 128 workers, said Surinder Lamba, president of Apache Aerospace Inc, a Washington state company that supplies tooling to all of Boeing’s commercial jet programs.