Is outsourcing to blame for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner woes?

It’s been a miserable week for Boeing. Federal investigators have grounded all of the U.S. company’s new and much-hyped 787 Dreamliner jets after reports that the aircraft’s lithium-ion batteries were overheating and catching fire.

And already, a favorite culprit has emerged: outsourcing. Critics have long charged that Boeing was far too reliant on offshore suppliers for the 787′s production. More than 30 percent of the jetliner’s components came from overseas, including the Japanese-made lithium-ion battery that is now garnering all the headlines. (By contrast, just 5 percent of the parts of its predecessor, the 747, were foreign-made.)

But why should outsourcing matter here? After all, it’s not as if Japan is incapable of making decent lithium-ion batteries. And this is where the argument gets a bit fuzzier. One possibility is that Boeing’s far-flung network of suppliers made it that much trickier for the U.S.-based manufacturer to spot and evaluate systemic problems. Here’s the Globe and Mail’s Guy Dixon making that case:

But the vast collection of components by hundred of suppliers that go into a 787 makes troubleshooting potentially more difficult. Although outsourcing has always been a part of commercial aviation, the difference now is the complexity and co-dependence of the electronics operating the aircraft.

Aerospace consultant Scott Hamilton quotes an engineer who raises similar worries:

“There aren’t that many qualified outside experts (except at Airbus). Where are they going to get them from?” he says. “This is where the extreme outsourcing really causes problems. How are they going to get their suppliers to be truthful? That has always been a problem in aeronautics. The 787 organization makes it much, much worse.”

These concerns are hardly novel. Back in 2011, Michael Hiltzik published a long piece for the Los Angeles Times questioning Boeing’s over-reliance on foreign suppliers for the Dreamliner. That piece, however, was largely focused on delays and cost overruns: “The drawbacks of this approach emerged early,” Hiltzik wrote. “Some of the pieces manufactured by far-flung suppliers didn’t fit together. Some subcontractors couldn’t meet their output quotas, creating huge production logjams when critical parts weren’t available in the necessary sequence.”

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