Originally Posted by
DaveReidUK
The degree of manufacturing automation that can be applied to an aircraft programme is, to a large extent, baked in at the design stage. In the case of the 737, that was 60-odd years ago.
I have no doubt that, had Boeing decided on a clean-sheet successor to the 737, it would have been manufactured in a completely different manner.
Indeed. Discussion with a longstanding production engineer was that, when a prototype/first unit of an item is produced, things have moved on from this being done by the development engineers themselves hand-building it off the line, because it's not so much seeing that the design actually goes together and works, that is the easier bit on something well designed, but working out HOW it is going to be produced in volume, using and proving the actual production tools and procedures.