here,” Howell said. “We have gotten better, the tooling is better. It’s going really, really well.” For Howell, a highlight was Family Day in the fall of 2013, when he and other Boeing South Carolina employees were allowed to bring family members to the site. Howell has three children. “Seeing the pride on their faces was very special,” Howell said. “It finally sank in for them. This is what dad does. He really does build airplanes.” Deutsch, the manager in Midbody Operations who started with Vought in 2007, also got a kick out of showing his family around the factory that day. “My family knew what I did, but they had never been here,” Deutsch said. “When they took the tour, my father looked at me and said, ‘Wow! You really are building airplanes!’ He just had imagined me working in an office or something.” The word about Boeing South Carolina and what is taking place here is spreading far beyond just family members. Frank Hatten is a retired IBM manager 24 Boeing Frontiers and current member of the Boeing South Carolina Education Relations team. He manages the site’s DreamLearners program, which targets young people up through the 12th grade and gives them an idea of what Boeing is doing in South Carolina, while encouraging them to study math and science. More than 100,000 students and adult educators have participated in the program since it began in September 2012. “A lot of students think you have to be an engineer or have a master’s degree to come work for our company,” he explained. “This program brings them in and lets them know we need all kinds of people as long as they have certain skills sets.” The state has programs to train aircraft maintenance technicians, and additional suppliers and other aerospace companies have established operations in South Carolina because of Boeing. A recent report by the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business said the aerospace industry in the state is now a $17.4 billion-a-year enterprise. “It’s become a destination for students coming out of college,” Hatten said. “They no longer have to go to the West Coast for a career in aerospace. Many want to stay in the Southeast. And Charleston is not a bad place to work.” Shawn Blake is one of those newer Boeing South Carolina employees. She beams with pride when talking about her job in preflight and delivery, where she and her teammates prepare 787s for delivery after they are rolled out of the Final Assembly building. Blake’s mother first told her about Boeing when she was an undergraduate at South Carolina State. “My mom said Boeing was coming
Frontiers March 2015 Issue
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