Originally Posted by
Turbine D
The Lafayette, Indiana factory was built there because GE Aviation gets quite a few technological personnel from Purdue University that is also located there. I might add that Rolls Royce has their only major US Jet engine facility located in Indiana. Indiana is more than agriculture, raising hogs and growing corn.
I think I'm possibly more aware of Purdue than you imagine. A university that used to run its own airline, Purdair, with DC9s (and before that DC6s - it even had the contract for the operation of Hugh Hefner's DC9). I think they did it because their sports teams had to travel so far to meet others. And thus I'm afraid the cornball comments, or as Thomas Hardy would put it, "Far from the Madding Crowd", stand. RR is at least in the more established industrial centre of Indianapolis, the longstanding Allison facility. Production plants do not need to be associated with research places, even the better known ones. Not for nothing are both Derby and Hartford in established engineering cities and regions.
With a 7 year order backlog worth $220 Billion, do you think for one moment there would be hiring constraints coming from GE headquarters in Boston? I don't think you understand the GE organization and the way it is run. GE has purposefully located facilities around the country, Ohio, North Carolina, Alabama, Kentucky, Texas, etc., to take advantage of available labor needs as well as lowered cost of doing business. The unemployment rate in the United States is nearing an all time historic low. In the airline business and the aircraft engine business employment levels and retirements tend to be cyclic. One of the major problems today is as lomapaseo indicated, lack of apprenticeship programs. So if you are wondering what the HR people at GE HQ were thinking, you might ask that question of airline companies as well:
All credit to GE for steadily, long-term, supplanting P&W as the premier US engine manufacturer, with very competent designs (well, as competent as a big fan which is only two-spool can be
). But I didn't say 'hiring constraints', I questioned an approach that looks to hire experienced high-tech production staff in, and to be paid at, cornball state levels, or to transfer them there from more sophisticated locations. Sorry, Lafayette, aka Hooterville, and mid-Indiana, but you are what you are. Yes, lack of apprentice training (and I notice here we are speaking about apprentices, not university grads) is an issue apparent worldwide, it goes with the desire not to train anybody ab-initio but to poach them from others, and yet still pay at local labour rates and with poor benefits which the people from Boston HQ would never put up with. Which has worked short term for a generation but now is increasingly an issue.