Boeing is centralising customer support for in-service aircraft at its Boeing Commercial Airplanes Engineering Design Center in Southern California. In May 2013, Boeing established engineering design centres in South Carolina, Southern California and Washington state to add engineering capability and capacity as the company scales up to meet growing demand for commercial airplanes and services. At that time, Boeing announced that support for out-of-production airplanes would be based at the Southern California centre.
“We’re creating a single location for customer support at the Southern California design centre to ensure that we are well-positioned to support Boeing airplanes in service around the world as the market continues to grow,” said Lynne Thompson, vice president of customer support, commercial aviation services, Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “We will be expanding our presence in Southern California to create a site dedicated to a superior customer experience. This move will allow us to tap into existing engineering talent in California to expand on our outstanding customer support and align resources in a single location.
“At the same time, we will focus our team in the Puget Sound area on helping customers introduce new airplanes – the 787 Dreamliner, the 737 MAX and the 777X – into their fleets,” Thompson added.
Boeing will continue to assess current and future work statements for each design centre based on capability, capacity, competitiveness and optimisation of the Boeing enterprise.
Customer support for the 707, 717, 727, 757, DC-8, DC-9, DC-10, MD-11 and MD-80/-90 models currently is based in Southern California. Customer support for the Next-Generation 737, 747, 767 and 777 models, as well as commercial product support for the KC-46 Tanker and P-8, will transition from Washington to California by the end of 2015.