Streamlined Plane Making

Boeing, Airbus Look to Car Companies' Methods to Speed Up Jetliner Production

The Wall Street Journal 04/01/05
author: Daniel Michaels
author: J. Lynn Lunsford
(Copyright (c) 2005, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

Bitter rivals Airbus and Boeing Co. don't agree on much, but these days their production gurus chant a common mantra: Let's copy Toyota, the company that reinvented car making.

The giant jet makers and their suppliers are going back to school to learn about efficient production from companies that churn out vehicles that are just a fraction of a plane's size and complexity. Cutting production costs and speeding assembly is a vital step in the Airbus-Boeing duel to stay competitive. Each is scrambling to hold down prices and increase sales to airlines, even as carriers' profits continue to wallow in the worst aviation crisis ever.

The new efficiency focus faces limits, though, in part because airlines demand far more customization than car buyers do. Safety regulations are also much more numerous and onerous for jetliners than cars. But the plane makers have recently grasped a big truth long ago pioneered by Toyota Motor Corp.: Working hard to keep things simple saves tons of money.

So airplane people are now designing parts with an eye to how fast they can be assembled. Both Boeing and Airbus have slashed their parts inventories, copied the way car makers organize factories and trimmed production times. Airlines, long treated like royalty, are getting less choice in the options available to them, from plane colors to cockpit layouts. Boeing has also managed to apply to gargantuan planes a technique long ago adopted by Henry Ford: assembly lines.

Not long ago, the idea of aping a mass-market car manufacturer seemed preposterous to aerospace people. Compared with a jetliner, cars are low-tech, cheap and puny. Car makers churned out millions of light vehicles last year, each priced in the tens of thousands of dollars. Annual output at Boeing and Airbus together was just 605 planes, some priced at almost $200 million. Car models change every few years, while jetliner models change over decades. In the past, Airbus and Boeing designed every piece of their planes. Now they still design whole jetliners, but leave engineering and production of many important components to subcontractors.

"We always thought airplanes were different because they had four million parts," says Alan Mulally, head of Boeing's commercial aircraft division, compared with the 10,000 or so parts in a car. "Well, airplanes aren't different. This is manufacturing."
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Boeing, which once offered more than a dozen shades of white paint, now offers just two.
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Not so long ago, every jetliner was custom-built. Airbus, which began its business in the 1970s, several decades after Boeing, from the start inched toward the auto-making model by building airplanes in sections, such as wings and cockpits. Final assembly became essentially a high-tech version of snapping together a plastic model airplane.

But in the past few years, Airbus and Boeing have pushed the process much further and started outsourcing entire components, just as car makers outsource systems like transmissions. Rather than give a contractor blueprints to fabricate a part, they have begun offering only general requirements and asked suppliers to propose designs -- another key to the Toyota system.
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Boeing, though, made one of the most dramatic production changes yet in 2001 when it began putting together planes on a huge moving line -- à la Henry Ford and his Model T. The motion "lent a sense of urgency to the process that we really didn't have when the planes were sitting still," says Carolyn Corvi, the executive who oversaw the change.
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