Tn grottaglie, near Taranto in the heel of Italy, they are working on the central-fuselage sections of Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner. The town's vast new factory was built by Alenia Aeronautica, one of several "risk-sharing partners" (rsps) selected by Boeing to produce the new aircraft. It is startlingly unlike a traditional airframe-manufacturing site, where aluminium panels are banged into place over a metal skeleton. Very few people are around. There is not much noise nor much sign of activity. The factory floor is dominated by the huge cylindrical "mandrels" that are used to mould the two compositernbarrels which will form about half the fuselage of the new plane. White-coated workers supervise machines as they wind graphite tape around the mandrels. The barrels are then coated in resin and cured in an oven the size of a small hangar.rnAfter windows and doors have been cut into them, the barrels trundle out to a waiting Dreamlifter (a modified Boeing 747 with a grotesquely swollen body), which flies them to Vought Aircraft Industries in Charleston, South Carolina, another rsp. There they are worked on further before being flown to Boeing's Everett assembly line near Seattle, where the 787 is put together from parts flown in from Asia, Europe and North America.
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