Kinston Free Press
In a little over a year, a full set of aircraft wing and fuselage components – broken into five shipments – has been shipped from Spirit AeroSystems’ Kinston plant, and company officials plan to ramp up to one shipment a month in the coming year.
It is a place officials with the Wichita, Kan.-based supplier of aircraft components planned to be by the end of 2011.
“We expected to ship two units before the end of the year, and what Airbus has asked us to do is plan on and prepare to ship one unit per month (in 2012),” said Don Blake, director of quality and site services for Spirit’s Kinston plant.
The Kinston facility, which opened in July of 2010 at the N.C. Global TransPark, was created to design, engineer and build wing and fuselage components for Airbus’ new A350 XWB passenger aircraft.
The components are made of composite materials rather than metal, because composites are considered by the aerospace industry to be lighter, yet stronger and less prone to fatigue then metals.
Airbus hired Spirit in 2008 to create the panels and floor grids for the center fuselage of the A350, plus the leading edge spar of the wing.
The sections of the wing spar were built and shipped first. The very first “production product” left Kinston via truck on Dec. 9, 2010.
“The wing products, or the wing components, are typically designed and constructed ahead of the rest of the airplane because it’s the most complex and the most important part, and so they want more time for design and test and construction,” Blake said.
The wing components have been trucked to the state’s ports at Morehead and Wilmington, and sent by container ship to Spirit’s manufacturing facility in Prestwick, Scotland, for final assembly, and then transported to Airbus’ facilities in Toulouse, France to be incorporated into the rest of the aircraft.
When put together, the spar is 102 feet long. After the first spar unit went out last December, a second one was shipped Aug. 22 and a third shipped Dec. 5.
The first fuselage panels went out Oct. 24 and were loaded onto a massive Antonov An-124, one of the largest cargo aircraft in the world. The panels were flown to another of Spirit’s manufacturing plants in St. Nazaire, France to be put together before being sent onto Airbus in Toulouse.
The containers needed to ship the 65-foot-long fuselage panels, are 20 feet wide and 12 feet tall, Blake explained.
While Spirit’s long-range logistical plan for Kinston is to ship fuselage and wing components by rail to the port at Morehead City, the first fuselage shipments this year went out by the cargo plane – on Oct. 24 and Dec. 4 – because Airbus wanted them before the Christmas holiday.
“These large freighters that were using, it can take multiple pieces of our units so that if we have units – if they’re done and they’re ready to go – we can put more than one unit on an airplane,” Blake said.
The rail link between the GTP and the east-west North Carolina Railroad line which runs through Kinston on its way to Morehead, is not finished. Officials with the N.C. Department of Transportation initially expected the link to be done by November, but Jim Fain, president of the Global TransPark Authority, said recently it will not be complete until next spring.
Even when the link is finished, Spirit officials do not plan to ship via rail until they can get an affordable rate from the freight company.
“We don’t have enough volume and frequency to get a really good rate,” Blake told the members of the GTP’s board of directors last week.
All parties involved are working to get an affordable rail shipping rate, though.
“Like many companies we have contingencies for all our shipping, and having the ability to ship by truck, by rail and by air is what is really attractive about the Global TransPark,” Blake explained.
Mark Pope, economic development director for Lenoir County, was also pleased with Spirit’s progress so far.
Company officials have stated they expect to have 274 full-time employees by the end of the year at their Kinston plant – Pope said about 40 percent of the Kinston workforce hails from Lenoir County.
“It shows that we are capable of building airplane components, and training people to build those (through LCC) so that’s exciting,” Pope said. “That’s pretty good for a community that’s built on textiles and manufacturing that’s not related to aerospace.”
Spirit also announced earlier this year it had won a contract to build wing spars for the Gulfstream G280 business jet.
Those components will be made of metal, and 22 people are expected to be hired for the Gulfstream work by the first quarter of 2012, Blake said.
“What that means, we have a lot more metal expertise in this state (than composite manufacturing) that we can feed on, so this is very good,” Blake told the GTP board members.
About 150 to 200 people all together are expected to be hired for the Gulfstream project, and about 1,000 for the Airbus project.
David Anderson can be reached at 252-559-1077 or danderson@freedomenc.com.