The Future of Commercial Aircraft Manufacturing

"Spirit AeroSystems employees look over the first Boeing 787 Dream Liner all-composite developmental nose section after its rollout ... in the Spirit AeroSystems plant in Wichita, Kan., Thursday."

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This technology may just be the way that Boeing is going to beat out Airbus in the future.

Assembling aircraft out of hundreds of thousands of pieces of aluminum, and millions of tiny rivets, is extremely time consuming and costly.

With this new large scale manufacturing capability, entire sections of a commercial sized aircraft can be molded in one piece out of composites. Each section can be stronger, lighter, fatigue-proof, and less expensive to produce.

This is certainly technology to watch.......

Here's the whole story in the Seattle P-I AP Photo/The Wichita Eagle, Mike Hutmacher, August 25, 2005