I'm impressed by the 747 Large Cargo Freighter, which will fly assembled fuselage sections from place to place....
Posted on 06/27/2006 9:15:38 AM PDT by skeptoid
NAGOYA, Japan -- For Boeing's Everett engineers working on the company's first all-new commercial jetliner in more than a decade, the dream begins here.s
In this Japanese industrial city far from The Boeing Co.'s Puget Sound roots, in a factory built just for the 787 Dreamliner, Fuji Heavy Industries has completed the first large composite section that will go on the first 787 to fly next year.
Measuring 17.4 feet long by 19 feet wide, the composite structure is the lower skin of the center wing box, a critical section of the jet where the 787 wings will be attached. The wing box also serves as the center fuel tank.
Piece by monstrous piece, Boeing and its partners are building an airplane in an entirely new way that circles the globe.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattlepi.nwsource.com ...
You must know more about building planes profitably than Boeing. You should be their CEO.
"You should be their CEO."
And you need to keep up with current Economics. Japanese labor has been more expensive than U.S. labor for some time now.
I never said Japanese labor was cheaper.
Boeing has reasons for building their next generation planes the way they do. If they could do it cheaper in the U.S. they'd do so. Profit motive is very powerful.
But if you think you can do a better job, be my guest - apply for the job of Boeing CEO.
The international effort seems like a great idea from the standpoint of selling the finished product, and from the standpoint of building a lot of them -- both points are seen in this paragraph from the same article:
"Seeking to build 10 a month
"The scale of this undertaking is mind-boggling. Once the 787 enters service in May 2008 with All Nippon Airways of Japan, Boeing is looking at building as many as 10 or more per month. Boeing has never produced more than 80 to 85 widebody planes a year, and is talking with its partners to determine maximum production rates. Executives with the three Japanese companies said they should be able to meet demand without having to expand their existing 787 plants, some of which are not yet finished."
Well, I don't see the point of your posts to me since I didn't claim that labor was cheaper in Japan.
I live in Wichita (Haysville). Do you work for Spirit, Boeing, Raytheon, Cessna, Learjet, Airbus or some other aircraft company? Just curious.
I am an engineer. It is my job to design things, and part out those things to be made. I know a bit about how things work together.
The thing you all so against "out-sourcing" gravely miss, is that JOBS ARE BEING *IN*-SOURCED as well. In the end, it all evens out.
Read some Thomas Sowell or Walt Williams.
I'm impressed by the 747 Large Cargo Freighter, which will fly assembled fuselage sections from place to place....
Correct.
Actually, 2 huge (related) things that make US manufacture too expensive and thus some out-sourcing occurs:
a) concept of MINIMUM WAGE
b) UNIONS - same concept, "I deserve $70k a year for turning screws"
This is all anti-capitalist and in the end will tank all those workers, not to mention the companies (never mind all the other nit-picking regulations that are fascistic). This is also why so many (mostly small, undoubtedly) businesses are using illegals, so they can dodge (a) which is far overvalues alot of simplistic jobs.
The evidence refutes that.
The fact is in aerospace it is net outflow of the capability. And the insourcing would have been a net export advantage. But now it isn't.
I don't recognize either Sowell or Williams as anything other than dogmatics who won't look at the evidence of what is really happening on the ground. The blind leading the blind.
You yourself missed the evidence and the key points above: U.S. aerospace engineering is collapsing. Not due to productivity eliminating the labor requirement either. But due to the pressures of foreign governments being allowed to co-opt, by a variety of means, our aerospace capability. This is the antithesis of free market behavior... And it is unfree market manipulation aided and abetted with the necessary collaboration/abdication by our own government in our country's demise. It facilitates foreign interference by inaction and neglect...and outright denial complexes. This is all covered-up and protected by the blind apologists who scream "free market, free market"...such as Sowell and Williams when the demise of the U.S. aerospace field is demonstrably contradicting them. I.e., the alleged "insourcing" are the furthest thing from the truth as to what is happening.
Let's see, Boeing stock has quadrupled since the article you rely upon was written. It generated almost $3 Billion in net income last year and over $7.5 Billion in operating cash flow. Some "collapse".
Perhaps you're correct about aerospace, but the comment originally was general. In that sense, we know, e.g., that there are auto manufacturing jobs in the US from Japan- and even German-based co's. I don't pretend to know the figures, but I think that Williams and Sowell know alot more about that than I do, as they are economics "students", if you will. I trust their research. Your dismissal of them and your flippant disparagement of them indicates perhaps indeed, you aren't much of a capitalist.
The collapse is very real. Perhaps you don't remember how many 747s we used to churn out every month. When the dollar was worth a great deal. $3 billion in net income is pathetic compared to where we used to be before the "Attack of the Foreign Governments".
The DOD [Dept. of Defense ] and the DSB [Defense Sciences Board] is even now realizing that we can't maintain our strategic missile capability for the long haul due to uncorrected current trends in our industrial diaspora.
I posted a major set of articles on this 5 months or so ago.
boeing employs, what, sometyhing in excess of 158,000 people. The fact that your individual job isn't as cushy as you might otherwise like is hardly a sign of Boeing's weakness, but rather it's vitality.
Sorry, not a 'fact' at all. I am not an aggrieved or disaffected employee. I am an AMERICAN nationalist, who has pointed to the legitimate national security concerns that certain people...mostly Liberals... wish to pretend away. You are blowing confabulatory fantasy smoke here. Guess again.
... is hardly a sign of Boeing's weakness, but rather it's vitality.
You must be one of these 'Emporer-with-no-clothes' Yes Men.' Or the glass has some drops in it, its okay, kind of guys. Never mind it used to be really full. I am not calling Boeing "weak." But the downsizing is not what any rational person would call real "vitality."
Boeing employs, what, something in excess of 158,000 people
No, its a bit less, 154,297 people. Of which approximately half, 76,366 are in the Integrated Defense Systems group. And that, while the industry dominant player in defense, is still totally inadequate for what is needed to maintain core capabilities.
E.g., The DSB has explicitly warned that we are in bad shape with regard to maintaining strategic strike skills as just one glaring red flag situation.
My guess is you're not employed in the sales department.
Which they could have built without outsourcing. They have never outsourced the wings or wing box before. Ever. This is 'last-gasp' one-trick-pony outsourcing of the technical expertise. The reason for the outsourcing is basically to enlist a set of countries to counter the anti-free-market EU conglomerate EADs/Airbus. The coalition is enticed in by the outsourcing...getting the technology, and the fabrication sales. A tremendous percentage of the total U.S. benefit to 'foreign' aircraft sales is thus lost right up front. Boeing gets customers with the induced countries, and financing which it could have gotten on the free market, but elected to skip, binding these countries more closely to the success of the project...and inducing yet more internal pressure in the countries for "back-scratching" orders.
This is a successful model...but one that is designed to fight fire with fire....and indeed...ups the ante.
State subsidies with state subsidies.
And the reason it is clobbering AirBus, which I think we can all salute...is that frankly, Boeing has vastly more and superior technology at its disposal than the pirates in France and Germany ever imagined...or as yet were able to steal. The 787 is the undenied recipient of a great deal of this treasure-trove. It is a technical marvel. Superior in all elements to anything Airbus has or will have. But now the technology therein, the comparative advantage, is being disseminated to "partners" who could just as easily in the future be competitors.
This opinion piece by Economist Alan Tonelson points to the fact that this has been observed before, and is in fact an axiom of trade history:
As McGill University political science professor Mark R. Brawley has argued in regard to the attempted establishment of international order, “the liberal rules [that] the leading state creates seem to diffuse economic power out of that country and into others, undermining the leader’s own position.” (Liberal Leadership: Great Powers and Their Challengers in Peace and War, Cornell University Press, 1993.) “Relative economic decline is explained through the success of the liberal leader’s capital-intensive sectors in exporting captial-intensive goods production and services,” writes Brawley, as this “allows capital to be accumulated elsewhere.” This is what is happening as American (and other foreign capital) flows into China to build production capacity, which is then supported by exports that destroy the home industries of the countries where the foreign capital originated.The decline of England has always been a favorite for this kind of analysis. As the prominent commercial lawyer and judge Lord Penzance warned in 1886, “The advance of other nations into those regions of manufacture in which we used to stand either alone or supreme, should make us alive to the possible future. Where we used to find customers, we now find rivals....prudence demands a dispassionate inquiry into the course we are pursuing, in place of a blind adhesion to a discredited theory.” The “discredited theory” to which Lord Penzance was referring is “free trade.” England had adopted this doctrine when it had a substantial lead in the Industrial Revolution and wanted to open foreign markets for its exports. But as conditions changed, its leaders clung to policies that no longer fit world affairs.
British historian D.C.M. Platt [Finance, Trade and Politics in British Foreign Policy 1815-1914, Oxford University, 1968] has argued that the leaders of Victorian England were so devoted to “free trade” that they were willing to sacrifice their direct interests to this intellectual ideal. Another British historian, Keith Robbins [The Eclipse of a Great Power: Modern Britain 1870-1975, Longman, 1983] has written, “To a few contemporaries, this devotion was perverse. It seemed obvious that the world was not following Britain’s Free Trade example. Germany introduced a measure of protection in 1879, France in 1882 and the United States in 1883 and 1900....But there was no British retaliation.”
The failure to adapt in a dynamic world is a central weakness of thinking bound by ideology; i.e., the belief that some doctrine is so perfect that it fits all times and places. Such blind faith can lead people to reject another idea they know will work, because it does not fit their misplaced “values.” For example, the Indian historian Partha Sarathi Gupta [Power, Politics and the People: Studies in British Imperialism and Indian Nationalism, Anthem Press, 2002] cites a 1915 memo from Ernest Low, secretary to the Viceroy’s commerce department, which acknowledged, “The public...have a policy [of protectionism] on the theoretical advantages of which a large section of them are unanimously agreed; which has been tried in many countries and can point to a considerable measure of success.” To head off the rising call for action, Low proposed a “committee of enquiry,” but one so rigged that “all questions relating to protection be ex hypothesi excluded....the enquiry will concern itself only with the examination of the alternative policies.”
Yes much of the body section and wings may be outsourced, but employment at the assembly plant in Everett has done nothing but gone up because of the huge sales of this popular new airplane.
I said it was a successful business model...but not for the long run. And it isn't anywhere near what we used to have when we were churning out 747s.
And how much of the success is the 'fight fire with fire' corruption of the free market, and how much would the foreigners have bought had the production all stayed in the U.S....a U.S. that finally forced a level playing field ala' Airbusted. We won't know, because it wasn't tried. The fire that Airbus brazenly represents...and even flaunts...has not been put out in the slightest. Indeed, even now they are openly being protected from even their huge mistakes, ala' the A-380 financial disaster. Subsidy after subsidy. And the U.S. Administration closes its eyes, and says nothing.
The study concluded that in 2004 as many as 406,000 jobs shifted from the U.S. to other countries.The true impact of outsourcing remains controversial. "There's mass confusion in the field on this one," said regional economist Scott Bailey of the state's Employment Security Department. Undeniably, Boeing, in seeking to stay competitive with Airbus, has dramatically reshaped airplane production as a global partnership with overseas suppliers of parts.
A spokesman said Boeing does not have data on how many of its layoffs could be attributed to outsourcing.
A January 2005 report by state economic analyst Alex Roubinchtein estimates that the aerospace-employment decline is one-third cyclical and two-thirds due to permanent structural changes — factors that include increased imports from outside the U.S. and increased productivity.
That means as many as two-thirds of the 51,000 local aerospace jobs that Boeing cut from 1998 through 2004 may have permanently disappeared.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002243920_postmanuside17.html
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.