GE Aviation Plant Leader Updates Progress
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowThree years after opening, the GE Aviation Lafayette Engine Facility is realizing some of its lofty ambitions. During an interview on a Greater Lafayette town hall edition of Inside INdiana Business with Gerry Dick, new Plant Leader Renato Vidal says nearly 200 will be employed at the plant by the end of the year. The company expected to add 200 jobs by 2020 when ground on the $110 million operation was broken in 2014.
Vidal says the plant will eventually be responsible for producing a hefty share of GE Aviation’s top-selling commercial jet engine. The Lafayette facility, he says, will be responsible for producing more than half of the 2,000 LEEP engines the company expects to churn out each year by 2020.
Vidal characterizes the plant as state-of-the-art and says the technology on-hand boosts both production and safety "using digital inspection technologies and barcode processes for all the processes coming in and going through the site, and all the ultra-sonic inspections, as well. So, everything that we have developed within aviation technologies, we have been applying to this plant."
Vidal has been on the job in Lafayette for about a month, succeeding Eric Matteson, who was the plant’s first employee and now works for GE Aviation’s supply chain organization. Vidal says the team that launched the Tippecanoe County operation "developed everything that we ever dreamed for an aviation facility."