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Boeing resumes 737 Max production in Renton after end of Machinists strike

Lauren Rosenblatt, The Seattle Times on

Published in Business News

Boeing has resumed production of the 737 Max in Renton after a Machinists strike left its factories in the Puget Sound region idle from September to mid-November.

The company expects to resume production of the 767 and 777/777X planes in Everett in the days ahead, Boeing said Tuesday in a monthly announcement detailing orders and deliveries of its aircraft.

The news that it has restarted production comes less than a week after the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, Mike Whitaker, visited Boeing’s Puget Sound factories and said the company had not yet resumed its operations.

In an interview with NBC on Friday, Whitaker said Boeing has taken the last four weeks to make sure it is ready.

“In previous strikes, they’ve just come right back and started production. This time, following safety management principles, they’ve been very systematic, so that is a positive development,” Whitaker said.

Boeing said Tuesday it is focused on safety and has retrained and certified some employees and worked to ensure all of its tools and parts were ready for an increase in production activity.

As it recovered from the Machinists strike, Boeing delivered 13 planes, mostly from its inventory in November, the company said Tuesday.

That’s greater than the number of deliveries it made after the previous work stoppage, which lasted 58 days in 2008. In November of that year, it delivered four planes.

But it’s a significant drop from the same month a year ago, when it delivered 56 commercial airplanes.

A lot has happened at Boeing this year, including the eight-week strike that silenced the Renton and Everett factories. After walking out in September, the Machinists reached a contract agreement at the beginning of November and returned to the factory by Nov. 12.

 

Boeing has also operated at a slow production rate nearly all year, following a safety incident in January when a panel blew off a 737 Max 9 plane midflight. After briefly grounding the Max 9 fleet, the FAA capped production of the Max plane at 38 per month. Boeing has yet to reach that threshold.

Now, it is working to return to prestrike production rates, the company said Tuesday. It’s not clear what that rate would look like for the Max. In Everett in August, a month before the strike, Boeing was building three 767s a month and four 777/777Xs per month, a spokesperson said.

In October, when Machinists were on strike for the entire month, Boeing delivered 14 planes, including four from its nonunion South Carolina plant and 10 from Washington facilities that were handled by managers and others not on strike.

Of the November deliveries, nine were 737 Max planes and two were 777 freighters. The other two were 787s, which Boeing produces in its South Carolina facility.

From the beginning of the year through the end of November, Boeing delivered 318 airplanes, including 243 of the 737 Max.

For comparison, Boeing’s rival Airbus made 84 deliveries in November and 643 in the first 11 months of the year. It also recorded 30 gross orders in November and 742 net orders for the year.

Boeing said Tuesday it booked 49 gross orders in November, including 34 orders for the 737 Max and 15 orders for the 767-based KC-46 tanker. Of the Max orders, five were from Alaska Airlines.

Year to date, Boeing’s commercial division received 427 gross orders. After cancellations, conversions and adjustments for some accounting principles, Boeing’s net orders for the year so far are 191.

The company’s order backlog grew from 5,462 at the end of October to 5,499 at the end of November.


©2024 The Seattle Times. Visit seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

 

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