The Daily Herald from Everett, Washington • 32

E4 Sunday June 29 2003 Herald Boeing rom Page El holes for mechanics such as Arion Owensby to drill to assemble the new jet The goal is to eliminate crane moves added Bair because all work must stop while operators such as Guy Nason move aircraft pieces tlirough the air and that adds to production time And Boeing is pushing airlines away from customized aircraft Bair said trying to persuade them to everything as common as you The 767 may have pioneered point to point travel across the At lantic Ocean but a 20th cen tury airplane wi th mechanical ca bles connecting cockpit to rudder doing the job that's done by elec tronics in the by 777 To convert Plane 912 into a tanker Boeing technicians in Wi chita Kan will work off schematics hand drawn by draftsmen a generation ago Es peland said plane been digitally defined" All things considered 767 is a mechanical plane" said Rich Harrington a third shift mechan ic from Everett one of the things he likes about it he added a good plane to work on pretty Passing the tests After all the body sections are ready for assembly Plane 912 seems to fly together been barely a week after the last crane move yet the sections have been riveted together and the engines have been hung from the wings The landing gear has been in stalled the wiring has been hooked to the sensors and the ca bles have been strung between the steering yoke in the cockpit and the rudders flaps and ailerons that allow the pilots to steer through the sky The airplane gets an interior not because it needs it the plane after all still must be extensively modified but because ederal Aviation Administration rules re quire it It must be in place for the flight down to Wichita So Plane 912 gets the bare minimum in cluding scraps of carpet salvaged from other jobs and signs that warn in Italian umare Nella (No Smoking in the Toilet After all that the plane is rolled forward for functional testing last final check to make sure every thing is good" Espeland said It can be a painstaking process checking to ensure that when the cockpit readout says the rudder is angled 15 degrees to starboard the rudder really is angled exact ly that much guy will be in the flight deck running handles the other will be out here checking move said Espeland standing beneath the tail of the plane Then they test whether the rudder works the same when the autopilot moves it And in some cases the test equipment is impressive in itself big carts of computers that monitor tests and store the re sults A lot of work goes into de signing them Espeland said amount of people who support us behind the scenes is huge compared to the actual people who touch the airplane" he said And yet some of the tests are pretty simple To test a hatch just open and close To check for water tank leaks they fill the tanks with water then look for drips They empty the tanks on the night the plane leaves the factory for the paint hangar Taking its first steps Boeing moves planes out of the factory in the middle of the night The reason: The planes go from the factory to one of three huge paint hangars which are on the south side of Highway 526 across the freeway from the main facto ry The planes are towed across an overpass and the spectacle has been known to stop traffic This night two cars stop in the middle of the freeway to watch Workers sit inside soundproofed booths during engine tests on the flight line The engines are run for about an hour making sure that all systems work Plane 912 make the trip from the factory the occupants of one hooting and cheering as a tractor tows it over at a comfortable walking pace a little bit of buzz on this Sunday night just before mid night Some guests have shown up to watch the rollout and the work ers often get company on the third shift Those in the know pass the word that this is the first tanker bound for the Italian air force The recently announced deal for 1 00 of these planes for the US Air orce still is fresh in mind The announcement was greet ed more with relief than celebra tion several workers say Everyone was aware of the dwindling num ber of 767s left to build The tanker deal was "a big or Harrington said should keep us And yet a rollout is a rollout 767s before this and No 913 will be ready inafew day's Dennis Lavalie hops in the trac tor use to move Plane 912 over to the paint hangar and a group who will walk alongside the plane keeping an eye out so the wingtips hit anything form up around it Lavalie will back up the whole way to the hangar then will push Plane 912 backward into the slot where it will be painted not hard to back up with a he said can keep an eye on going on Getting its plumage The hallways outside the paint hangar are covered with brightly colored pictures and cutouts that depict the the paint schemes of airline customers The colors can dazzle like the brilliant plumage of a tropical bird: the magenta flowers and purple tail of Hawaiian Air lines the gleaming silver and red and blue stripes of longtime cus tomer American the understated blue and gold of new customer Vietnam Air Plane912 is gettingnone of that The plan is to paint a few parts with primer and then a coat of bland 707 Gray (the name is a code with no con nection to the famous Boeing jet) The rest of the plane get painted until the modifications are completed in Wichita so for now all it will get is a layer of a pro tective coating that's intended to keep the aluminum from corrod ing said Greg Kline a paint hangar supervisor a kind of "mustardish yel low" he said extremely unusual to do this Kline said four planes since have gone out from his shop without a com pleted paint job The two tone scheme also points out one of the differences between 21st century materials and traditional alu minum The 767 is towed to the paint hangar where it will be taped and sprayed tv I I Bajs i VK 4 A' i 4 s' Rubin Phommachanh finishes putting the masking tape and paper over portions of the nose cone Taping a plane this size takes the paint hangar crew between three and four hours The parts getting the gray paint including the tail the landing gear doors and the radar dome at the tip of the nose are made from composites which need corrosion protection Kline said composite will hold up because Before either the paint or the protective coating goes on the paint hangar crew will mask off portions of the plane with broad swaths of brown paper and masking tape There are fewer than a dozen of them yet it takes less than three hours to do it working on platforms that hang from the ceilings but seem to hover in midair You should see us during the holidays quipped Scott Davis "We wrap our Christmas presents like lying high into the sun Plane912 takes its first flight on a warm day in June the sunlight glinting off the metallic lemon lime protective coating as the jet climbs into a surprisingly cloud less sky or die past few days flight line workers have done more func tional tests on the plane It is the first chance for them to test the engines since been mounted on the wings said Gary Pugh who is director of the Everett delivery center where customers take possession of new jets a and suspenders he said to make sure there are no engine leaks and that all the systems that run off engine power work properly Plane 912 seems almost alive or the first time one can hear machine sounds inside it the woosh of air through cooling ducts as fans move air through the electronics bay like the plane is breathing Pugh agrees Once a new air plane comes out of the paint hangar and gets its first load of fuel almost like putting the lifeblood into the he said rom then on the plane has the ability to power its own sys tems Pugh has worked on the flight line for 25 of his 33 years at Boe ing He grins a fun kind of he said "To be at this end of the pro duction line you see the work everybody did upstream making components and bits and assem bling it all just one of those fun He and a visitor look into the cockpit completed with rows of knobs and displays They peek into an electronics bay where dozens upon dozens of boxes are stacked like the backroom of a stereo showroom Outside Pugh runs his hand gently over the riveted aluminum skin of Plane 912 and says it still impresses him when he thinks of all the things that go together to make an airplane fly look at all the hand crafts manship that goes into he said an amazing piece of work It really Reporter Bryan Corliss: 425 339 3454 or corlissheraldnetcom McCusker: reddie Mac earnings investigation is going too far rom Page El end of 2002 but also was at tempting to use these derivatives to smooth out earnings Smoothing out earnings is not the crime of the century and most companies engage in it to some degree Whether or not reddie Mac stepped over the line by using improper accounting in smoothing it? income is a matter for the investigators to determine It is certainly remarkable though that this is the first ac counting scandal that will end up with higher earnings instead of losses reddie Mac itself esti mates that its accounting restate ments will add between $15 bil lion and $45 billion to its earn ings since 2000 The fact that there is a spread of $3 billion in its estimates says something about accounting precision when de rivatives are involved No matter how the criminal and civil investigations into actu al wrongdoing come out the reddie Mac situation raises is sues for us in terms of economic policy There is no question that reddie Mac performs a useful function in our economy But clearly its risk management poli cy needs gome work Derivatives are long established risk man agement tools but when they are piled high each overlapping and offsetting another they develop a life of their own a life that often ends unhappily Congressional oversight should have addressed this be cause it was not hidden from view but instead its hearings were mostly concerned with the whining of the banking industry that reddie Mac and Ginny Mae have some unfair advantages (They do Get over it) We need another ac counting scandal to throw cold water on our timid economic re covery and what we most cer tainly need is an accounting issue inflated into more than it is Instead of headline hunting Congress the SEC the Justice De partment and the ret of the in vestigators should drop their sub poenas and do something useful by setting up interest risk man agement standards and ensuring compliance James McCusker is a Bothell economist educator and con sultant He also writes "Business 101" which appears monthly in The Snohomish County Business Journal.