I was snubbed for the big rollout event in Everett on Sunday for the 787. I patiently waited for the limo to pick me up and take me there so I could sit next to Gary Locke. A ticket or Limo never came. It seems Boeing has not forgiven me for making them site the 787 in Everett against their wishes (per Boeing's statements to me). As I (per Boeing) had more to do with siting the 787 in Washington than Gary Locke, and so saved the entire future of final assembly of "Boeing" airplanes in the future that Gary Locke takes credit for wrongly, I should have at least had his seat in the front row. Oh well, I just watched it on TV instead. Mad I was snubbed? No. I don't hold grudges like Boeing apparently does.

I was pleasantly surprised by some things in the ceremony. There was no talk of quality I heard of (my TV blacked out for a few minutes when my microwave and air conditioner were turned on at the same time and flipped the breaker, which also powers the TV), and safety was also not mentioned, except for once, when the word "safer" was used. The light and nonexistent use of those terms during what was in effect just a huge sales pitch for the 787 made it much less hypocritical to me than it would have been otherwise.

I did find Bair's having different customer, government, and manufacturing site groups stand up for recognition offensive. The groups were recognized in order of importance to Boeing, with customers asked to stand first. Who was asked to stand up last after all the partner representatives stood up that Boeing outsourced most of the work to? You guessed it--actual Boeing employees. Truly getting the recognition Boeing has always seemed to treat them with--dead last in order of importance.

Also I didn't like Bair's padding the numbers of Boeing employees who work on the program. It seemed they were at least doubled by the family members they brought (perhaps just to make the Boeing employees seem more numerous to the cameras?). Also, I suppose the vast majority who stood up did not currently work on the program, or will not within the next year or so. The vast majority likely were engineers, who will be kept on the payroll not one day longer than Boeing has to keep them, no doubt. Once 787 R&D is over, they're history, literally, if they don't find a place on a new program at Boeing. It would have been much more genuine if Bair had recognized 787 temp employees (engineers) seperately from the actual production employees. But apparently he didn't want to recognize the mechanics and inspectors seperately. Could it have been because their numbers were so few?

I hope the sound at the event wasn't as bad as it was on the TV broadcast. That truly would have been embarrassing for Boeing.

Apparently Boeing didn't want the South Carolina employee's faces on camera, so they gave them cards to hold over their heads to make a huge poster. I've posted before about my lack of knowledge of where in the South that boy from "Deliverance" with the banjo was from, but my suspicions may have been correct, judging by most of them hiding behind poster boards. They did pretty well, considering. You could almost make out what the individual poster boards were meant to say when they were flipped.

Also done well at the event was the map of the globe that moved to each partner site. Fittingly, the globe rotated first straight from Everett to where the 787 is really mostly built--Japan. I truly appreciated Boeing's difficulties in getting the partners up to speed when I saw the Japanese representatives of the three Japanese sites try to speak English. You'd think they would be the ones that spoke the best English at their sites. If so, that's scary. Obviously they couldn't read English very well if they couldn't speak it. I hope whomever translates the production data to Japanese and back doesn't screw up at all.

It was interesting seeing who Boeing placed in the front row. I noticed Seattle's Mayor there. I wonder why Boeing was thusly pandering to him?