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EVERETT — Time and again, the future Boeing planned for and the one that resulted have been radically different.
Nineteen years after Boeing rolled back the doors of its Everett, Washington factory to reveal the first 787 Dreamliner to the world, that same setting is once again poised to play a key role — bankrolling the company’s future as an airplane developer.
Boeing is plowing around $10 billion into putting the 737 back on track, The Air Current estimates, including the $8.3 billion it spent last year to buy back the program’s biggest supplier. The plane maker has earmarked another $1 billion to expand the narrowbody’s manufacturing footprint in factory space formerly dedicated to some of its most ambitious commercial forays.
The easternmost wing of the Everett plant was built in the 1990s for the 777 and later served as the first home to the carbon fiber 787 Dreamliner. And, even before Boeing consolidated all of the Dreamliner production in South Carolina in 2021, the company and Washington state officials pondered building the New Mid-Market Airplane (NMA) in the space. Development was mothballed first in early 2020 and again, for good, in late 2022.
The same location, Everett’s 40-26 bay, was back in the spotlight on July 10, when hundreds of employees, executives and dignitaries gathered to formally kick off the 737 program’s North Line. Doing so lays the foundation for raising production rates to 63 aircraft per month and eventually reach the 70-jet monthly tempo Boeing is now studying, building cash reserves to repair its balance sheet and fund the company’s first clean-sheet aircraft since the 787.
Related: Boeing explores hiking 737 production close to rival Airbus’s stratospheric target
But Boeing, which turns 110 on July 15, won’t see an immediate return on its latest 737 investment. The company plans to build the first 10 single-aisle planes at a deliberately slow pace. Deliveries won’t begin until Federal Aviation Administration inspectors are convinced the Everett-built narrowbodies are carbon copies of the 737 aircraft assembled at the main Renton plant 35 miles to the south.
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