Boeing’s 737NG production line in Renton, Washington is now benefiting from a new automated panel-assembly process, as the company continues its efforts to prepare for a throughput increase from 42 to 47 aircraft a month by 2017, then to 52 by 2018. The increase will start next year at roughly the same time as Boeing transitions from current-generation 737s to the new 737 Max.
The so-called Panel Assembly Line, or PAL, fastens stringers to wing-skin panels at twice the rate Boeing could manage using traditional processes. Mukilteo, Washington-based Electroimpact designed a machine that “normalizes” the panel with an array of lasers that “see” the surface without touching it, allowing it to follow the panel curvature or contour. The process improves accuracy, consistency and “repeatability,” said Boeing.
Speaking in Renton just before the start of the Paris Air Show, Boeing’s director of Renton factory operations, Marty Chamberlin, noted that the PAL represents yet another major advance in automation as the company prepares to begin running the new 737 Max through the production line by the end of the year.
Chamberlin also stressed the importance of ensuring the introduction of the Max into production does not disrupt what he called the very efficient system Boeing has developed for the NG. “It is going through, I’ll say, validation on NG,” said Chamberlin of the PAL. “But we will be using it to produce Max.”
Plans call for the Max line–the central line of the three final assembly lines in Renton–to incorporate three positions, where Boeing would build the initial examples as well as perform flight test installations and other miscellaneous items.
The PAL replaces a “legacy” system for skin-to-stringer fastening in which mechanics install some 40,000 fasteners a day, about half of which are done manually. Boeing estimates the PAL will cut flow time by 33 percent, defects by 66 percent, factory “footprint” by 50 percent and injuries by 50 percent.
In Renton, Boeing has also begun the process of building a new “systems installation tool,” which will help to insert blankets, wiring and other systems into fuselage sections before they go to the wing-to-body join area, adjacent to the west line.
Since last year Boeing has restructured the factory floor in Renton yet again and installed the wing-to-body join tool that the two current production lines use, ensuring its production readiness for the Max.
Meanwhile, the company has consolidated fuselage systems installation (SI) from two parts, each serving one assembly line, into a single, new three-level moving design tool, allowing the company to more efficiently use the available volume at Renton.
“You can put the fuselage in one section of the tool and it will move in a pulsing fashion, much like our moving lines do, but they will pulse, so that the work moves to the mechanic rather than the mechanic continuing to move to the product in our old [process],” said Chamberlin, who described Renton as the most efficient aircraft production plant in the world.
Boeing has commissioned two-thirds of the SI tool, where fuselages occupy six of what will become nine positions, and three sets of three airplanes feeding three production lines. Chamberlin said it takes roughly four days for a fuselage to run through the systems installation tool, immediately before it proceeds to wing-to-body join, gets its landing gear and then down the assembly line. He said the company expects to fully commission the tool by the end of this quarter.