In less than 12 months, a new name will join the top rank of North American cities hosting final assembly sites for business jet aircraft, rivaling a dominant triumvirate of Wichita, Kansas; Dorval, Quebec, and Savannah Georgia.
That city will be Melbourne, Florida.
A third planned expansion at Embraer’s site adjacent to the Melbourne International airport is already underway. When the expansion opens in mid-2016, Melbourne will have the capacity to deliver more than 100 business jets annually from a central Florida site that opened only three years ago.
That puts the Brazilian manufacturer within easy striking distance of the annual output of the Cessna Citation Jet plant in Wichita, Bombardier’s combined Global and Challenger factory in Dorval, and Gulfstream’s widebody assembly complex in Savannah.
Embraer’s expansion in Melbourne coincides with the manufacturer’s evolution as a global company, with major manufacturing facilities now in Brazil, the USA, Portugal and China.
But the Melbourne site represents the company’s most ambitious move outside Brazil. By the middle of next year, it will be the exclusive final assembly location for four Embraer executive jet models – the Phenom 100, Phenom 300, Legacy 450 and Legacy 500. It also includes a jet delivery centre and what will become the company’s largest engineering centre outside of Brazil, employing 200 staff at peak levels designing interiors and premium seating.
The site is also expanding as Embraer invests in US companies. Last year, Embraer acquired California-based Aero Seating Technologies (AST). The rebranded Embraer AST business, including an aircraft seat factory, is being relocated to Titusville, Florida, a town adjacent to Melbourne.
By mid-2016, Embraer will have spent eight years and about $150 million to complete this manufacturing and engineering complex in central Florida.
It is still possibly only the beginning. Embraer has made it no secret that it plans to eventually explore the market for large cabin, ultra-long-range business jets. The decision on where to manufacture such an aircraft remains even more distant, but Melbourne’s rapid rise as Embraer’s exclusive assembly plant for executive jets makes it a prime candidate. In the near-term, Embraer could expand capacity by bringing more assembly tasks on-site.
But the first step is to keep assembly operations in Melbourne on track through mid-2016 when the expanded factory becomes operational.
Embraer opened the existing factory in Melbourne in 2011. The company originally planned to make only a portion of the Phenom 100 and 300 jets being delivered to North American customers. Its remit was later expanded to become the exclusive final assembly site for Phenon 100 and 300 jets. Embraer next announced that an expanded factory would begin producing Legacy 450 and 500 jets as well.
The expansion will add a spacious new wing running perpendicular to the current Phenom assembly line. Both the Phenom and Legacy assembly lines will run length-wise down the new wing of the factory. The space currently occupied by the first half of the Phenom assembly line will used to stage kits and subassemblies.
The Melbourne site brings Embraer closer to several major suppliers in North America. The Phenom jets are equipped with Garmin avionics and Pratt & Whitney Canada engines. The Legacy 450 and 500 feature Rockwell Collins avionics and Honeywell engines.
The major aircraft structures, however, are built up in Brazil and Portugal. Major fuselage sections and wing assemblies are shipped to a deepwater port in Jacksonville, Florida, then loaded onto trucks and driven south to the Melbourne plant.
Embraer is not the only aerospace company to discover the attractiveness of the US southeast region as a manufacturing hub. As noted, Gulfstream has been assembling an iconic series of large business jets in Savannah since the late 1960s. Airbus recently opened a final assembly line in Mobile, Alabama, for A320 airliners. And a potential Embraer rival, HondaJet, expects to start delivering the company’s light jets from a sprawling factory in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Embraer itself is no stranger to the US southeast either. Only 10 years after the company was formed in 1969, the company opened its first US sales office in Florida. As the Brasilia turboprop became established is US airline fleets, Embraer established a permeant sales and maintenance hub next to the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International airport.
Embraer’s defence business also has a growing presence in Florida. In the northern Florida city of Jacksonville, Embraer assembles Super Tucanos to deliver to Sierra Nevada, which has a contract with the US Air Force to deliver the light attack fighters and advanced trainers to partner militaries, such as the Afghan air force.
When Embraer looked for an executive jet assembly centre in the US in 2008, Florida was not the only option. In Wichita, Kansas, for example, the global financial crisis would have severe repercussions for the local business jet manufacturers Cessna, Hawker Beechcraft and Bombardier Learjet, creating a glut of jobless experienced workers and surplus production capacity. Airbus quickly noticed the opportunity and established an engineering centre in Wichita.
But Embraer was instead attracted to central Florida. Melbourne offered several logistical advantages, including easy access to deepwater ports and the runway of a relatively lightly used commercial airport. It was also on familiar ground in a state where Embraer had deep routes. Most importantly, perhaps, was the imminent demise of NASA’s space shuttle programme, with its huge launch complex in nearby Cape Canaveral. With thousands of trained aerospace engineers and mechanics soon entering the job market, Melbourne offered Embraer a perfect location for establishing both manufacturing and engineering centres in the USA.
The engineering centre started taking shape soon after Phenom assembly operations began in Melbourne in 2011.
Embraer already employs 4,000 engineers and 2,000 skilled technicians at several sites in São Paulo state. They are recruited mainly from Brazil’s relatively modest of aeronautical engineering colleges. The Institute of Aerospace Technology, for example, produces about 120 graduates a year. These students are combined with engineering graduates of other institutions, such as the University of Sao Paulo, to form a 1.5-year graduate programme hosted by Embraer.
But that output is still less than the annual output of aerospace engineering graduates produced by private and public universities in Florida alone.
“Being in Florida enables us to access these qualified people,” says Paulo Pires, Embraer’s managing director of the Melbourne engineering centre. “The American aerospace market is huge compared to Brazil.”
Embraer aligned the engineering centre to fill a particular specialty that doesn’t yet exist in Brazil. Several decades of US business jet manufacturing has developed a cadre of interiors specialists. These are experts in the designs of not just the seating, monuments and interior walls, but how those structures fit into the various interior systems, including in-flight entertainment and environmental controls.
“When you look at the United States, there is a huge market, a vibrant market with a lot of companies,” Pires says. “When you add these capabilities, it enables us to think higher than we used to do.”
The engineering centre is a turn-key complex for designing and testing premium interiors. The facility houses enough office space for 200 workers, of whom 100 have already been hired. These engineers can produce and test those designs with an on-site rapid prototyping cell, which is able to quickly produce mock-ups of cabins and interior structures. But it won’t always be necessary to build the physical products.
Earlier this year, Embraer leveraged a grant from Space Florida to establish an on-site virtual reality centre. Three-dimensional engineering drawings developed using Dassault Systèmes Catia V5 software are already available. Those drawings are then projected in 3-D form into full-scale, virtual model projected onto the floor. Workers wearing specially designed goggles can virtually walk through a fully designed aircraft cabin. The system is supplied by camera maker Canon on a grant from Space Florida.
Such technology goes beyond anything that Embraer is using in São Jose dos Campos, its Brazilian headquarters. That has made the centre’s capabilities attractive beyond the executive jets division. Indeed, with the certification of the Legacy 450 last August, Embraer does not have an announced executive jet in development for the first time since 2005.
The company, however, is developing a new family of re-engined and re-winged commercial regional jets. The E-Jet E2 family have economy-class cabin that do not demand the kind of speciality knowledge now available in Melbourne. But the new E-Jets will be offered with premium-class cabins with amenities not far removed from Phenom- and Legacy-class private jets.
So Embraer has teamed the Melbourne centre with its recently acquired seating manfuacturer, Embraer AST, to develop business class seating for the E2 family of jets.
The role of the Melbourne engineering centre beyond the E2 will continue to be premium-class systems. By then, Embraer may finally be ready to challenge the industry’s elite club of companies capable of developing ultra-long-range, large cabin business jets. If the company decides to make such a move, the Melbourne site’s new capabilities will be an essential piece to making the programme a success.
“These [first] 200 engineers is the first goal. We must get there,” Pires says. “Beyond that I think the market will say.”
Source: FlightGlobal.com
