Douglas Moves Part of MD-80 Work to Utah : Aerospace: No jobs will be lost in Long Beach. The payroll in Salt Lake City will rise to 800.
McDonnell Douglas announced Tuesday that it will move a portion of its MD-80 jetliner production from its Douglas Aircraft plant in Long Beach to a facility in Salt Lake City.
The transfer will not reduce the number of jobs at Long Beach, the company said, owing to growth in a number of aircraft programs at the Long Beach unit. But the move will increase jobs at the Salt Lake City plant to about 800 from the current 300, the company said.
The production to be transferred involves the assembly of upper and lower fuselage sections for the MD-80, a twin-engine passenger jetliner that--along with its predecessor, the DC-9--has been the mainstay of Douglas’ production since the 1970s.
The decision is part of a new Douglas policy, disclosed last month, in which the firm plans to divest assets and transfer operations from Long Beach in an effort to focus more closely on final assembly of aircraft.
The MD-80 will be the first commercial aircraft work to be transferred out of Long Beach, but last year the company announced the move of the Navy T-45 trainer jet program, involving 1,800 jobs, to St. Louis.
“This will allow us to reassign skilled assemblers and support personnel into other areas of final assembly operation in Long Beach,” Buzz Lowry, general manager for MD-80 production, said in a statement.
“By moving these two operations to Salt Lake City, we are freeing up tremendously skilled groups of employees who not only will be available to strengthen our final assembly work, but also to help train the employees hired in Salt Lake City,” Lowry added.
A Douglas spokesman said Tuesday that the company will begin sending MD-80 tools to Salt Lake City at the end of this month and will build some new production tools there.
Despite the transfers of work, Douglas plans to add 300 jobs in Long Beach this year, resulting from stepped-up production activities on its MD-11 jetliner program and its Air Force C-17 cargo jet program.
Douglas employs 38,000 workers at its Long Beach facility, 5,000 in Torrance and 7,000 in other locations, including a large plant in Canada that makes wings for the MD-80. At its low point in the early 1980s, Douglas had about 14,000 employees, of which 12,000 worked in Long Beach.
Douglas’ 194,430-square-foot plant east of the Salt Lake City airport was opened in September, 1987, and began making smaller sub-assemblies for the MD-80 and MD-11 commercial transports.
“We have already begun hiring qualified structural assemblers in anticipation of the upper and lower fuselage work coming here,” Al Egbert, general manager of the Salt Lake City facility, said in a statement Tuesday.
