Boeing forms new avionics group
 

Setting up Boeing Avionics is tantamount to an admission that Boeing made a mistake 14 years ago as the 787 Dreamliner program was launched.

That’s when Boeing dissolved an in-house organization created in the 1980s called Boeing Commercial Electronics (BCE), dispersing 1,200 engineers in Everett who designed electronic controls for all its airliners and selling off a plant in Irving, Texas, where another 1,200 people built the hardware.

The move, part of a broad handoff of control to airplane-systems suppliers, was intended to cut Boeing’s costs.

Dwight Schaeffer, a former senior manager at BCE, said Boeing tried on the 787 to cut the one-time cost of developing its new airplane by outsourcing work to “get someone else to pay for it.”

The result was “a disaster,” he said.