South Carolina employees have military experience. The site shares runways with Joint Base Charleston, formerly Charleston Air Force Base, which has a large fleet of Boeing-made C-17 Globemaster III military-transport aircraft. Married and with four children, Painter said he never gave a thought to working for an airplane company. But when he read the job skills Vought was seeking for new hires at its just-opened factory, he realized he would be using some of the same hand tools he used in the military to repair weapons. Building commercial jetliners that have millions of parts is not easy. The learning curve for most employees at Boeing South Carolina has been steep. But few of the early employees who worked for a company called Boeing almost 100 years ago knew very much about building airplanes. With time, training and experience, they learned 22 Boeing Frontiers new skills, new processes—and built airplanes better and more efficiently. And they passed along the knowledge gained to others. It’s the same story at Boeing South Carolina, which received a lot of help from sites all over Boeing and particularly Everett. The jobs behind schedule have been cut dramatically. There is much less of the so-called traveled work, or unfinished tasks that get put off to be accomplished out of sequence further down the production line. “The big hump we all had to get over to become really good at this was just believing in ourselves and knowing that it could be done, that we could do this work if we had the right tools and processes in place,” Painter said. “And you are talking to the right guy if you want to know how good it is, because my team’s COA and first-pass quality are at an all-time high.” COA stands for Condition of
Frontiers March 2015 Issue
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