As an aircraft manufacturer, if you are seeking to completely revise or modernise your production system, there are many obstacles to successfully implementing major change.
Workforce incomprehension or intransigence, supply-chain push-back, internal confusion, outdated facilities – can all prove formidable hurdles.
With the aerospace industry's roots – and factories – in some cases dating back a century, it is a challenge for companies to modernise sites in order to cope with the demands of cutting-edge manufacturing.
Yes, it can be done – but sometimes cost or site specific constraints mean that the only way to move forward is through building an entirely new plant.
That is very much the position Airbus Helicopters found itself in with its rotor blade manufacturing factory in La Courneuve, on the outskirts of Paris.
The facility had deep roots within French aerospace, tracing its history all the way back to 1917 and the production of SPAD fighters.
Since then, the site had grown in a piecemeal fashion, says Laurent Prat, director of the blade manufacturing operation at Airbus Helicopters.
“[La Courneuve] had no expansion capability and was very expensive to maintain,” he says, describing it as a “patchwork” of buildings, laid out in an “opportunistic” way.
There was no over-arching logic to the site's plan, and, consequently, production efficiency gains were hard to realise.
By 2010, Airbus Helicopters had decided that if it was to cope with predicted future growth then it needed to move. It acquired a plot of land at the nearby Le Bourget airport – on what used to be a naval air station – and began planning.
The result is a new facility featuring a single main building of 40,000ft² (3,710m²), which opened on 1 April 2017. Although that is the same as the combined covered space at the La Courneuve plant, the overall footprint of the Le Bourget site, at 180,000ft², is double the size.
There is now an operation with a logical path for a blade to move through the factory, rather than the "spaghetti flow" of the old site. Research and development are also located near to the production facility, allowing designs to transfer rapidly to the prototype stage.
Capacity rises to 5,000 blades per year – whether new or repairs – although thanks to weak market conditions, annual output is presently at about 3,500.
But as well as the creation of a new, more modern facility, the move to the Le Bourget plant ties into the company's wider industrial strategy.
Since Guillaume Faury arrived as the airframer's chief executive in 2013, he has been looking to transform how each helicopter is made, and make the process more akin to building airliners.
Under his plan, each of Airbus Helicopters' manufacturing sites – Albacete in Spain, Donauwörth in Germany, and Le Bourget and Marignane in France – will specialise in a particular area.
For example, Marignane will focus on dynamic components, Donauwörth on fuselages and Le Bourget on blades.
This might sound like an obvious approach, but work previously carried out at the La Courneuve plant included the fabrication of a number of fuselage parts such as cowlings and the Fenestron shroud on the AS365 Dauphin (although, interestingly, not blades for Fenestron tail rotors, which are machined from aluminium and will continue to be made in Marignane).
"We cannot afford to have engineering resources here and there; it is not possible, it is not competitive at all. So we concentrate all the assets in one location. All the blades for future products will be made on this site," says Prat.
That process begins with the in-development H160 medium twin. However, the focus is on the future: at the moment, the Donauwörth plant still produces blades for the H135 and H145, the two civil helicopters assembled at the German facility. That will continue, even under the new industrial plan, "for a long time," says Prat. However, once successors to the pair are introduced, the blades for those models will be designed and manufactured at Le Bourget.
In addition, research and development activities will also be transferred across from Germany, as Le Bourget stakes its claim as a centre of excellence for rotor blades.
"The majority of activities of research will be moved from Donauwörth to Le Bourget," says Prat.
"It will not be done in a day – it will be a long journey - but the vast majority of research will be moved to Le Bourget.
"I can't tell you there will be no [blade R&D] at Donauwörth, but the big bulk of research on blades will be at Le Bourget. The move will be long, probably I won't be here anymore, but after a few years the complete research of blades will be here."
The first helicopter to be produced under the new industrial model is the H160, due to enter service in 2019. This features hockey stick-shaped Blue Edge blades, which were designed and developed at La Courneuve, but which will be manufactured solely at Le Bourget.
Apart from their unique shape, the H160's blades are, in every other respect, largely identical to every other carbonfibre blade on the market. They feature a pre-preg composite outer and honeycomb inner, with a glassfibre central spar and titanium leading edge.
They are manufactured using a manual process, in much the same way as those for legacy helicopters like the Dauphin or Super Puma.
"What we want to introduce for the coming programmes is automation. Instead of using pre-preg, can we use new ways of producing composite?" says Prat.
Underpinning the ambition is the desire to "increase repeatability, increase the quality of our parts and reduce the cost of the blades".
A number of automation concepts "using robots" to perform the lay-up of the pre-preg are in the research phase, says Prat. Although the target is to introduce these on future programmes, there is also the possibility of adapting the production process for the H160, albeit this is not guaranteed.
"We are progressing very fast on the prototype and have quite good concepts at the moment. We are experimenting not on samples but on real-size blades," he adds.
Some baby steps in automation have taken place, such as for the sanding and painting of the blades.
In the meantime, Airbus Helicopters is using the move to the new facility to change the relationship it has with its workforce, and how they perform their activities.
Prat says it boils down to an attempt to harness the collective intelligence of its employees. "We have 650 people on site, which is 650 brains, how do we exploit all of those?" he says.
Examples of new ways of working include encouraging staff to down tools and check their workstations: "If they see anything [wrong] they should raise their hand." It is, he says, about taking the time to "step back and collate the information".
There is a desire, adds Prat, to grant more "autonomy and authority" to individual workers. "This will have huge benefits for the quality and safety of our products."
As well as the new surroundings, which have made it easier to "change the mindset", the shift is also driven by the composition of the workforce itself, which is "completely different" to older generations and "have different expectations" about their place of employment.
"They need to be able to decide the way they work," he says. Airbus Helicopters has to grant that "freedom" if it wants to attract and retain the best people, says Prat.
As an example, blue-collar staff are able to design and improve their own workstations using bolt-together components, or alter the size of their work area: in one case, a bench was dramatically reduced in size after workers pointed out they were now only using 1/10th of what was originally a blade-length surface.
It will also be a heavily digitised site – all employees are to be issued with tablet computers, which link through to a central system featuring instructional videos, or a video link to experienced staff who will be able to troubleshoot any problems.
Aside from improvements to the manufacturing process, Airbus Helicopters is also wrestling with new future blade concepts.
Its Blue Edge design increases performance, providing 100kg (220lb) of extra lift across the H160's five blades. That same concept could be applied to the X6 heavy-twin currently in the early stages of development – at its launch at the 2015 Paris air show, initial renderings were shown with hockey stick-style blades.
Although he concedes that a "Blue Edge blade would make sense" for a helicopter larger than the H160, and would offer "a similar kind of efficiency and noise reduction", there is no guarantee the design will be used on the X6.
“There is no one solution. We do believe that for each kind of new programme you have to compare all the [possible] shapes and make a choice.
"We have all different kinds of rotor, we prefer to make the right choice for the right helicopter, for the blades it is the same. For future programmes we don’t know if the blade will be straight or a Blue Edge one.”
But with Airbus Helicopters also exploring the high-speed compound rotorcraft with its Racer concept – which features a pair of pusher propellers – and the City Airbus lightweight octocopter, there is the possibility that the plant will still branch out in future.
But nothing is yet decided, and in both cases, it will face competition from a number of companies who are already experts at making propellers.
One technology Prat rules out, however, is the use of a morphing blade, which, using actuators, could be re-configured mid-flight in order to optimise efficiency during different phases.
“These are old concepts we tried to develop years ago and they are very complex. So we prefer to work on the shape of the blade and not in any variable shape," he says.
Source: FlightGlobal.com
