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Time Lapse Build of a Super Hornet

I've been in that plant and it's a pretty amazing process. Not much automation at all - some drilling rigs. Mostly lots of skilled manual labor.

Brett
 
That's pretty wild, and a cool find. I had no idea these things were so labor intensive, I would have thought assembly would be way more automated, too. That'd be a cool tour.
 
scoolbubba said:
That's pretty wild, and a cool find. I had no idea these things were so labor intensive, I would have thought assembly would be way more automated, too. That'd be a cool tour.
Click to expand...

Yeah, we got to see the actual airframes in various stages of build-up that were going to end up in our squadron. The Boeing folks love taking fleet guys through.

Brett
 
scoolbubba said:
That's pretty wild, and a cool find. I had no idea these things were so labor intensive, I would have thought assembly would be way more automated, too. That'd be a cool tour.
Click to expand...
You should see how labor intensive it is when a P3 comes to us for MOD or SSIK. We just removed the wings from a tube today; Monday the rebuilding of said wings begins. It will be here for quite some time in various stages of rebuild.
 
I was quite surprised at the amount of hands on too. Anyone know what the total build time for one airframe is?
 
Definitely very hands on...I figured they would be more automation and prefab stuff going on there. Very cool though. Nice to see they pay so much attention to something that we all might end up sitting in.
 
That is pretty crazy. When I used to work at NADEP North Island, I remember seeing the F-18 charlies broken up into 3 or 4 parts being completely reworked. And I thought that was a lot of work....
 
Might be a dumb question but I will ask all the same.
Why is aircraft production not heavily automated as automotive production is. Could it be a quality assurance issue or the fact that we will never build as many F-18's as say Ford F-150 to justify the cost of automating the process?
 
Clux4 said:
Might be a dumb question but I will ask all the same.
Why is aircraft production not heavily automated as automotive production is. Could it be a quality assurance issue or the fact that we will never build as many F-18's as say Ford F-150 to justify the cost of automating the process?
Click to expand...

"An F-18 in every driveway!"

I'm not sure, maybe they don't want assembly line parts being stolen or rebuilt elsewhere? It's much harder to steal or train an entire team than it is to steal a machine or blueprints.

Okay, was able to watch it, that was really neat, I wish they had slowed down some parts like when it was all starting to come together. After seeing that, 50 million dollars starts to look like a bargain!
 
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