Engines of Democracy

From Shipyard Laborer to Jet Mechanic

In a plant that has been open only since 1993, Duane Williams is a veteran. Williams, 33, started at GE/Durham in February 1994. He's a tech-3, certified to do any task that's necessary to make a GE90 engine for Team Raven.

He's standing at a big table, starting work on the "stage 5" disk of an engine's low-pressure turbine. This is the back end of the engine, where power is generated not to fly the airplane but to run the engine itself. This back-end turbine creates the spin that turns the big fan up front. When it's done, the stage-5 disk -- made of polished metal, lying flat on the table -- will look like a very large version of a child's pinwheel. "It's just 20 minutes out of the box," says Williams. This is not the glamour work of turbo-jet assembly. It's one of those parts of the job that is reminiscent of long and lazy childhood Saturday afternoons spent gluing together plastic model airplanes and ships.

The stage-5 disk has 120 identical curved blades around its perimeter. Each blade needs to be checked, by hand, for nicks or roughness. It is then greased with something like Vaseline, and its dove-tailed ends are slotted into place. Although the technicians do the same routines over and over, every stage of an engine's assembly is laid out in detail in an encyclopedia of three-ring binders. Each task is broken down into steps, and every step is illustrated with a color photo of that part of the engine being assembled correctly.

Like every other technician at GE/Durham, Duane Williams has his FAA ticket as a power-plant and airframe mechanic, and he went through two years of school and a certification test to get it. That's an unusual prerequisite for building engines: No other GE jet plant requires job candidates to be FAA-certified mechanics. But the need for an FAA license is one of the founding principles of GE/Durham.

Back in the early 1990s, that license wasn't doing Williams much good. After getting it, he couldn't find an aviation job in Norfolk, Virginia, so he took a job doing maintenance for a McDonald's franchiser who owned 16 restaurants. Eventually, he got a job at a navy facility, beefing up F-14 fighter jets to handle more powerful engines. When he was laid off about two years later, Williams returned to what he calls "my old faithful: working as a laborer at a shipyard." When he heard about the possibility of jet-engine - assembly jobs in North Carolina, Williams hustled down to GE/Durham for an information session. "They mentioned the team concept," says Williams, "but I never even gave it any thought. I didn't know if I was up for it. But a job -- I was up for that."

Williams is a cheerful man who conveys an innate optimism. Starting with his interview, the hiring process at GE/Durham introduced him to a work culture that he had never imagined -- one that would change his life. "The interview, now that was one heck of an experience," he says. "It lasted eight hours. I talked to five different people. I participated in three group activities with other job candidates. I even had to do a presentation: I had 15 minutes to prepare a 5-minute presentation."

For Williams, the respectful, demanding interviewing process turned out to be the beginning of an eye-opening experience. "My first six months at the plant were something I wasn't prepared for," he says. He was part of Delta team -- the startup team charged with building the CF6 engine. The CF6 is the Honda Accord of GE jet engines. It is in its 28th year of service and in its fifth evolution of jet-engine technology. It's a super-reliable workhorse, flying everything from ups cargo jets to Philippine Airlines A320s to Air Force One. Back in 1994, GE/Durham started making the CF6 engine, in addition to the GE90.

"We had to come up with a schedule. We had the chance to order tools, tool carts, and so on. We had to figure out how the assembly line to make the engine should flow. We were put on councils for every part of the business," says Williams. It was his first taste of an environment in which there really are no bosses: The technicians not only build the engines; they also take responsibility for the work that middle management would normally do. "I was never valued that much as an employee in my life," says Williams. "I had never been at the point where I couldn't wait to get to work. But here, I couldn't wait to get to work every day. That's no BS!"

The visible joy that Williams gets from his work, and from his participation in his work, remains as palpable as his recollection of those early days, when he was helping to start up the first CF6 team. Part of his education at GE/Durham has involved something that many teams stumble over: how to get around the truism that committees don't make decisions, people do. At GE/Durham, virtually every decision is made by a team, by consensus. Consensus is another of the founding principles of GE/Durham. It is so ingrained that technicians have turned consensus into a verb: The people at the plant routinely talk about "consensing" on something.