Casey nodded. "The wing is over there," she said, pointing across the floor. "It's two hundred feet long - almost as long as a football field."
A Klaxon sounded. One of the overhead cranes began to move. Richman turned to look.
"This your first time on the floor?"
"Yeah ..." Richman was turning around, looking in all directions. "Awesome," he said.
"They're big," Casey said.
"Why are they all lime green?"
"We coat the structural elements with epoxy to prevent corrosion. And the aluminum skins are covered so they don't get dinged during assembly. The skins are highly polished and very expensive. So we leave that coating on until Paint Shed."
"Sure doesn't look like GM," Richman said, still turning and looking.
"That's right," Casey said. "Compared to these aircraft, cars are a joke."
Richman turned to her, surprised. "A joke!"
"Think about it," she said. "A Pontiac has five thousand parts, and you can build one in two shifts. Sixteen hours. That's nothing. But these things" - she gestured to the aircraft looming high above them - "are a completely different animal. The widebody has one million parts and a span time of seventy-five days. No other manufactured product in the world has the complexity of a commercial aircraft. Nothing even comes close. And nothing is built to be as durable. You take a Pontiac and run it all day every day and see what happens. It'll fall apart in a few months. But we design our jets to fly for twenty years of trouble-free service, and we build them to twice the service life."
"Forty years?" Richman said, incredulous. "You build them to last forty years?"
Casey nodded. "We've still got lots of N-5s in service around the world - and we stopped building them in 1946. We've got planes that have accumulated four times their design life - the equivalent of eighty years of service. Norton planes will do that. Douglas planes will do that. But no one else's birds will do that. You understand what I'm saying?"
"Wow," Richman said, swallowing.
"We call this the bird farm," Casey said. "The planes're so big, it's hard to get a sense of the scale." She pointed to one aircraft to their right, where small clusters of people worked at various positions, with portable lights shining up on the metal. "Doesn't look like many people, right?"
"No, not many."
"There's probably two hundred mechanics working on that plane - enough to run an entire automobile line. But this is just one position on our line - and we have fifteen positions in all. There's five thousand people in this building, right now."
The kid was shaking his head, amazed. "It looks sort of empty."
"Unfortunately," Casey said, "it is sort of empty. The wide-body line's running at sixty percent capacity - and three of those birds are white-tails."
"White-tails?"
"Planes we're building without customers. We build at a minimum rate to keep the line open, and we haven't got all the orders we want. The Pacific Rim's the growth sector but with Japan in recession, that market's not placing orders. And everybody else is flying their planes longer. So business is very competitive. This way."
She started up a flight of metal stairs, walking quickly. Richman followed her, footsteps clanging. They came to a landing, went up another flight. "I'm telling you this," she said, "so you'll understand the meeting we're going into. We build the hell out of these planes. People here are proud of what they do. And they don't like it when something s wrong."
They arrived at a catwalk high above the assembly floor, and walked toward a glass-walled room that seemed to be suspended from the roof. They came to the door. Casey opened it.
"And this," she said, "is the War Room."
WAR ROOM
7:01 A.M.
She saw it freshly, through his eyes: a large conference room with gray indoor-outdoor carpeting, a round Formica table, tubular metal chairs. The walls were covered with bulletin boards, maps, and engineering charts. The far wall was glass, and overlooked the assembly line.
Five men in ties and shirtsleeves were there, a secretary with a notepad, and John Marder, wearing a blue suit. She was surprised he was here; the COO rarely chaired IRTs. In person, Marder was dark, intense, in his mid forties, with slicked-back hair. He looked like a cobra about to strike.
Casey said, 'This is my new assistant, Bob Richman."
Marder stood up and said, "Bob, welcome," and shook the kid's hand. He gave a rare smile. Apparently Marder, with his finely tuned sense of corporate politics, was ready to fawn over any Norton family member, even a nephew on loan. It made Casey wonder if this kid was more important than she thought he was.
Marder introduced Richman to the others at the table. "Doug Doherty, in charge of structure and mechanical..." He gestured to an overweight man of forty-five, with a potbelly, bad complexion, and thick glasses. Doherty lived in a state of perpetual gloom; he spoke in a mournful monotone, and could always be counted on to report that everything was bad, and getting worse. Today he wore a checked shirt and a striped tie; he must have gotten out of the house before his wife saw him. Doherty gave Richman a sad, thoughtful nod.
"Nguyen Van Trung, avionics ..." Trung was thirty, trim and quiet, self-contained. Casey liked him. The Vietnamese were the hardest-working people at the plant. The avionics guys were MIS specialists, involved with the aircraft computer programs. They represented the new wave at Norton: younger, better educated, better manners.
"Ken Burne, powerplant ..." Kenny was red haired and freckled; his chin thrust forward, ready to fight. Notoriously profane and abusive, he was known in the plant as Easy Burne because of his quick temper.