The Boeing Dreamlifter can carry every section of every Boeing airliner that goes to Everett. The 787-10 mid-fuselage is too big — so every 787-10 ever built has been assembled here.
A Pirep featured story · KCHS Charleston International, Charleston, SC
In the early 2000s, Boeing made a bet that would reshape American commercial aviation. Instead of building the 787 Dreamliner the conventional way — one assembly hall, parts feeding in from local suppliers — the company would farm out 60% of the airframe to a global network of subcontractors. They would build large sub-assemblies (wings, fuselage barrels, tail sections) and ship them to a single integration line. Fully pre-installed systems were supposed to cut final assembly time from three weeks to three days.
To move the parts, Boeing built the Dreamlifter — four converted 747-400 freighters with a swollen hull cross-section roughly three times the cargo volume of a normal 747. The Dreamlifters fly wings from Mitsubishi in Nagoya, fuselage sections from Leonardo in Italy, and other components from Spirit AeroSystems in Wichita to wherever final assembly happens. Originally that was just Everett, Washington. By 2009, Boeing also needed a second site.
It picked Charleston. Vought Aircraft and Italy's Alenia Aeronautica had been building 787 aft fuselage sections at a joint-venture facility next to Charleston International Airport since 2004. Boeing bought both companies' shares of the operation in 2008 and 2009. In October 2009 it announced that a second 787 final assembly line would be built on the same property. The first South Carolina-built 787 rolled out on April 27, 2012, and was delivered to Air India that year.
Then came the airplane that wouldn't fit. The 787-10, the longest of the Dreamliner family at 224 feet, has mid-fuselage sections too large to load into a Dreamlifter. Every 787-10 ever assembled has therefore been built at Charleston. The first was delivered to Singapore Airlines in May 2018.
In October 2020, in the middle of the pandemic shutdown, Boeing announced that all 787 production would be consolidated in South Carolina. The last Everett-built Dreamliner rolled off the line on February 26, 2021. Since then, every 787 that flies, of any variant, has been assembled here.
Boeing broke ground in November 2024 on a 1.2-million-square-foot expansion that will eventually allow four parallel assembly lines running at North Charleston. The third is scheduled to open in 2028. KCHS shares its runways with Charleston Air Force Base, home of the 437th Airlift Wing's C-17 Globemasters. The widebodies and the airlifters share the same final approach.