Earning Their Wings

The Inland Northwest Aerospace Consortium has succeeded in putting an eastern Washington industry cluster on the map.

Linn Parish | February 2011 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

They say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In the Inland Northwest, aerospace manufacturers are counting on that cliché being true.

A number of airplane components and parts are made in the greater Spokane area, and many of those manufacturers are banding together in hopes of collectively becoming a tier-one Boeing Co. contractor, defined as a company that can contract directly with Boeing, instead of with other contractors and subcontractors.

“Getting qualified as a tier-one contractor at Boeing would be huge for a lot of our members,” says Michael Mooney, co-director of the Inland Northwest Aerospace Consortium (INWAC), a local trade organization. “They want to be able to bid projects as a group.”

To that end, the Consortium has created the Manufacturing Services Network, through which it markets a group of local companies as a single source for potential customers. Getting that tier-one status is also the Consortium’s biggest challenge because as a consortium, it would be more difficult for the companies to speak with a single voice; instead, they’d act for the benefit of the group over the needs of any individual company.

Many INWAC-affiliated companies have well-established relationships with Boeing that are decades old, but the concern is for several of the smaller companies that could be cut from the equation if Boeing looks to eliminate suppliers, essentially getting its parts from fewer sources. The general trend with Boeing has been to reduce its number of suppliers, Mooney says, adding that no one among the Consortium’s companies is currently threatened with losing a contract. Todd Woodard, the other co-director of INWAC, says the group could position itself as an affordable, nearby contractor for the big airplane maker.

The Consortium hasn’t secured that tier-one status from Boeing yet, but in a relatively short amount of time—five years—it has been able to do something else: It has made the cluster of aerospace manufacturers in the Inland Northwest part of the statewide aerospace conversation.

At last count, more than 80 companies in the Inland Northwest make some sort of airplane component or part. Collectively, according to a 2007 study, those businesses employ a total of 8,100 workers with a total payroll of $325 million.

To illustrate the region’s role in airplane manufacturing, the Consortium took a photograph of a Boeing 747 and drew arrows pointing to different components