Each Friday morning anywhere from a dozen to 20 people get together for a meeting that's unlike any other in The Boeing Company's history. Designers, engineers, managers, supervisors and machinists are collaborating on creating two demonstrator jet fighters.

Nothing unusual there. Every time a Boeing military aircraft moves off the drawing board and CAD screen into the assembly plant, meetings take place.

But as aerospace engineers in jeans and polo shirts file in to a Seattle room to talk, listen, plan and schedule production of a new fighter plane their colleagues are 1000 miles away in Palmdale, Calif. They're meeting electronically using Windows NetMeeting.

NetMeeting is communication and collaboration software that allows live audio and video between two computers, and file-sharing with additional computers. With it, computer users connected across the country can share resources as if they were in the same building.

California assembly
The team working under deadline to complete the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) demonstration aircraft is the first Boeing group to use NetMeeting in this way. While the fighter project is managed from Seattle, the planes are being assembled in the California desert near Palmdale.

By using NetMeeting's features, Boeing's team has been able to close the geographic gap between Seattle and Palmdale. Boeing estimates that the electronic meetings have reduced the need for team members to travel by 80%.

In the past, building a plane at a plant distant from the project managers would have been very difficult, if not impossible.

"We had to find some method that would allow us to communicate with Palmdale and St. Louis (another Boeing site)," says operations analyst Alan Coleman. "This is a good way of showing them what we are doing."

Charting progress
Coleman is among those taking part in the weekly meetings. The Seattle meeting room is dominated by a large electronic screen called a SmartBoard, while all around the walls are progress reports, charts and graphs showing assembly history and target dates for completion of the two airplanes.

For the weekly meetings, Boeing uses NetMeeting simultaneously with a telephone conference call that links Palmdale, Seattle and a Boeing office located in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Rosslyn. The plane's customers attend the meetings in D.C. and can see files shared via NetMeeting.

Once the call is made, a video image appears on the screen: a triangle of latticed metal that is the wing assembly in Palmdale. In a well-practiced demonstration before the meeting turns to official business, Gary "Ollie" Olin in Palmdale zooms in on a penny laying on a work surface in Palmdale. Olin can mount a camera on his head, strap one on to his waist or tote one on his shoulder to send video images to his colleagues in Seattle. He can roam freely and is limited only by the cables that transmit the video images into the computer in Palmdale.

See and talk
"If people need to see any detail, such as wires that might be frayed, it is much better than what we used to get - either a written description of the problem or a fax," comments Walt Cannon, technical team lead for assembly. "This is so much better. We can actually see the problem while we're talking about it."

And it's better for more than Boeing staff. The meeting room in Rosslyn contains representatives of the plane's customers - US Air Force, US Marine Corps, US Navy and Britain's Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.

"They can ask a question and, boom, the video shows up on the screen in Rosslyn," adds Coleman.

On the agenda
As with any meeting, there's an agenda, this one drawn up by Cannon, who cradles a cordless keyboard as he directs what's on the screen. He gets the meeting underway.

NetMeeting allows anyone connected to share and use the same files, even if they are stored on a computer hundred of miles away. Equally, all linked parties can share files and what's known as a whiteboard, a virtual blank screen that can be used for swapping notes, sharing sketches or other details. The SmartBoard is a physical whiteboard that engineers can draw on with big colored marker pens.

A member of the JSF assembly team in Seattle walks over to the screen and calls up Excel spreadsheets showing progress on wing parts. In Palmdale, a colleague uses PowerPoint to present a series of slides of the tail assembly taking shape. There are more Excel spreadsheets showing detailed lists of parts that are color-coded for ease of assimilation: yellow for on time, orange for late.

Hard to imagine
There's a sense of rhythm as each presentation is made, a question asked, a response given, and the business briskly moves on to the next section of the project. Given the ease and efficiency with which the engineers use NetMeeting, it seems hard to imagine that an earlier system of conducting meetings involved either everyone being in the same room or the use of a conference phone call.

"It makes it much easier to manage our remote sites program from up here (in Seattle) with a tool like this," Coleman says of NetMeeting.

After hearing from all the engineers listed on the agenda for this day, Cannon closes the meeting with a "bye" and a click to end the connection.

For detailed information on the new planes, visit the Boeing Joint Strike Fighter Program Web site.

Gordon Black was awed by the sheer number of parts that go into one plane.

You don't have to be building a multi-million dollar aircraft (or have the benefit of a high-speed corporate network link) to use Windows NetMeeting. It's free to Windows users, and easy to use with standard phone lines. With NetMeeting you can collaborate with colleagues or plan a family reunion, using audio, video and shared resources. You can download NetMeeting from the Windows NetMeeting Web site.