How did the meeting between Leonardo and the unions on the future of the Grottaglie site go?

Leonardo confirms for the Grottaglie (Taranto) plant the tiltrotor installation line,the AW609 aircraft, part helicopter and part airplane, but also confirms the four-month stoppage that will be managed through ordinary redundancy payments. This is the data that emerges from today’s meeting between the company and unions at the Unindustria headquarters in Rome, a meeting that began in the afternoon and continued until the evening.

Wide the delegation of Fim, Fiom and Uilm present at the table, while for Leonardo there was also the director of Human Resources, Antonio Liotti, who reiterated the company’s desire to relaunch the Grottaglie hub, going beyond the single-customership, represented by the fuselages of the Boeing 787, through a definitive industrial solution. Which consists precisely in bringing the second assembly line of the convertiplane, the Italian one, to Grottaglie, while the first is in the United States, in Philadelphia.

The company’s choice of the AW609 has therefore been confirmed, while negotiations between the parties continue to manage the economic phase. The latter is represented by the lower production of fuselages for the 787 (the central section and the central rear section are manufactured in composite in Grottaglie) following the new plan communicated by Boeing. The unions have already highlighted the main numbers of this plan. In fact, the forecast for 2024 has gone from 87 fuselage recalls to 54, while for 2025 it will drop from 118 to 97.

In Boeing’s program, the withdrawals from Grottaglie will be 5 per month until the end of the year, 7 in January-February next, 8 from March to December 2025 and 10 from 2025 onwards. For Leonardo, therefore, it is necessary to align the lower demand from Boeing – affected in the USA by various problems – with the production pace of Grottaglie, also because the plant has a backlog of fuselages that must be disposed of. The instrument used should be the ordinary redundancy fund and would only involve the production component of the site linked to the 787 program. The organizational methods remain under discussion between the parties, whether temporary closure of the production line, or slowing down of the production itself. Today at the table Leonardo hoped to find a unitary agreement in the next meeting on July 15.