Boeing got a clear message from the Federal Aviation Administration: The grounded 737 Max won’t get approval to fly again anytime soon. So the company had little choice but to idle the giant factory where the plane is made, The Associated Press writes.
Boeing announced Monday that it will suspend production of the Max starting sometime in January, with no specific date for when the Renton, Washington, plant will be restarted.
The company said it won’t lay off any of the factory’s 12,000 workers “at this time,” and many could be diverted to plants elsewhere in the Seattle region. Some could also be assigned to work on the 400 jets that Boeing has built since the Max was grounded in March but couldn’t be delivered.
Boeing’s decision is a recognition that it will take longer than the company expected to get the planes back in the air, said Richard Aboulafia, an aircraft industry analyst at the Teal Group.
“If they had gotten some information quietly, behind the scenes, from the FAA that things were looking good for January or February, they wouldn’t have done this,” he said.
The Max is Boeing’s most important jet, but it has been grounded since March after crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed a total of 346 people.
The FAA told the company last week that it had unrealistic expectations for getting the plane back into service. Boeing has missed several estimates for the plane’s return date.
The agency has not given a specific date for approving the Max’s return, but FAA Administrator Stephen Dickson has said it will be done on the agency’s timetable, not Boeing’s.
Even if no employees are laid off, ceasing production still will cut into the nation’s economic output because of Boeing’s huge footprint in the U.S. manufacturing sector. Through October of this year, the U.S. aerospace industry’s factory output has fallen 17% compared with the same period last year, to $106.4 billion, in part due to previous 737 Max production cuts.
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