Technology has been transformed at two Airbus UK sites that have become centres of excellence for wing manufacture
The birth of the new A380 commercial airliner and A400M military transport has given rise to a quantum leap in manufacturing technology at Airbus UK.
"We've been through a big change over the last few years as we've focused on our two sites at Broughton and Filton becoming the centres of excellence for Airbus wings," says Charles Paterson, head of A400M wing manufacture.
The transformation has happened as the UK element of the Airbus business, previously held by the former British Aerospace, has developed a clearer identity with the formation of the single Airbus company in 2001, which left BAE Systems and EADS with stakes of 20% and 80%, respectively.
Besides designing, supplying and supporting wings for all Airbus types, Airbus UK has design and supply responsibility for fuel systems and, for most variants, landing gear. It also supplies wings and fuselages for Hawker 800XP business jets, a legacy from the former British Aerospace operation that was sold to Raytheon. This remains a lucrative business, with about 50 shipsets delivered last year.
The site at Filton, south-west England, employs 5,800 and is responsible for overall business management of all Airbus UK activities as well as engineering research, technology and wing, landing gear and fuel system design. It will also join Broughton as a wing manufacturing site when the A400M military airlifter enters production in 2005. "Filton is the engineering headquarters for Airbus wings," says Paterson.
Broughton employs 6,100 in its capacity as manufacturer and subassembler of large components, including wings, which are assembled and equipped on site before delivery to Toulouse.
Airbus UK supports 84,000 jobs that are directly connected to wing manufacture, of which 22,000 arise from the A380. "We have the potential to double that business in the near future when the A400M comes on board," says Paterson.
Since 1998, £1.2 billion ($2.2 billion) has been spent on capital investments at the two sites, for jigs, plant, machinery and buildings associated mainly with Airbus programmes. Including design, manufacture and assembly, the A380 has required almost £2 billion of investment, including a new office block and A380 landing-gear test facilities at Filton and a £350 million, 83,500m2 (900,000ft2) aerostructures assembly facility at Broughton, called the West Factory, for assembling and equipping the A380 wing panel and wing. A further £73 million has been spent on updating facilities at Broughton for A380 stringer fabrication and for skin milling and creep forming of wing panels.
It is at Broughton that the extraordinary scale of the A380 wing manufacturing operation becomes apparent. The site has already delivered three A380 wingsets, with the fourth due to follow in July. The first glimpse of a set of completed wings creates a feeling of wonder that these vast structures will carry the first A380 into the air at the start of 2005. The depth of each wing at the root is 2.4m (7.9ft) - easily enough to accommodate a fully grown human with arms raised.
The first thing a visitor to the West Factory sees is a single A380 wing resting in a vertical LVERS electro-impact machine, where rivets and lockbolts are installed automatically. Further inside, a pair of floor-level milling machines have been installed, each capable of machining 18 of the 20 A380 wing-skin panels from a single aluminium billet, the largest of which is 35m long. Innovative practices have been introduced to speed the process and reduce cost and weight, and to transport the huge panels through treatment and creep-forming areas. The latter includes a 42m- long autoclave weighing 300t - one of the largest in the world.
Automation has taken over from manual assembly in a way unimagined when Airbus UK worked on the first set of wings for the A310 in the 1970s. New horizontal automated drilling machines can be moved up and down the wing jig to the correct position, automatically adjusting the tool point axis to an accuracy of ±150µm (millionths of a metre). For the landing gear, another machine drills fastener holes up to 25mm (1in) in diameter and 100mm deep to fasten the huge gear-rib reinforcing structure through the skin to the rib spar structure.
Much of this is relevant to the existing production line, says Brian Fleet, senior vice-president Airbus UK wing manufacturing. "We're looking at bringing in this level of automation for the single-aisle family," he says.
The next programme to benefit will be the A400M, the first military aircraft to be produced by Airbus. The first UK-manufactured component for the A400M - a wing rib - will begin being machined in the first quarter of 2005. As with its civil aircraft, Airbus UK is responsible for overall management and design of the wing and fuel system and for equipping the wings, as well as developing design competence in air-to-air refuelling.
The metallic/composite hybrid A400M wing will be assembled at Filton. The decision to use Filton was taken after Avro RJ regional jet production ended, says Fleet. The A400M will mark the introduction of composite materials manufacture at the factory, where £135 million is being invested between A400M contract award in 2003 and first deliveries in 2008. The programme will create or secure work for 8,000 people in the UK, 900 of them at Filton.
Complex programme
With six national customers taking workshare proportional to their respective production offtakes, the A400M is by definition a complex programme and brings associated organisational challenges. The UK offtake of 25 aircraft (out of a total of 180) was enough to bring wing final assembly to Airbus UK, but only a small proportion of the actual manufacturing work. "The UK gets 13% of the programme by cost, although the wing accounts for more than 20%," says Paterson.
The answer was to create a programme management organisation divided into aircraft component management teams (ACMT) - trans-national organisations responsible for the full development of a given component. Each ACMT co-locates the necessary disciplines from all partner companies to ensure on-time delivery to the necessary standards. "It's actually quite simple now," says Paterson. "Essentially it is a multinational and multi-company organisation that acts as one team."
The wing ACMT is based at Filton and brings together the manufacturing activities of eight operations, based in Toulouse and Nantes (France), Madrid and Seville (Spain), Bremen and Stade (Germany), Belgium and Turkey.
If Airbus Military's market predictions come true, there will be A400M work at Filton and Broughton for a long time. Besides the 180 aircraft for the existing partners, Airbus estimates a need for about 1,440 A400M-type aircraft up to 2022, including 470 aircraft in 56 countries other than the USA, China and the CIS.
In its role as designer and supplier of landing gear for the A380 and A330/A340, Airbus UK operates landing-gear test facilities at Filton, where the gear for the A340-500/600 remains on test and the Goodrich-supplied main landing gear for the A380 has undergone initial tests and is being prepared for testing up to and beyond certification.
Paterson says Airbus UK is hiving off all low-value-added machinery. "Our strategy is to concentrate on large machining operations for major assemblies," he says. Small, low value-added items such as bushes, pins and bolts will be outsourced by 2006. Filton produces 40% of all Airbus wing ribs.
Head of A400M manufacturing (UK) Dick Ovens says: "It makes a lot of sense for us to concentrate on the higher-value items where we can see more added value and reduce the costs of manufacture."
Airbus UK has benefited in particular from the use of three-dimensional design and manufacturing systems, because, says Ovens, "we have a huge systems integration job with leading and trailing edges, flap and slat transmission, landing gear and fuel systems". For the A380, which requires 148,000 computer-generated models, the ComputerVision CADDS 5 and Dassault Systemes Catia v4 systems were integrated to produce a full three-dimensional model of the entire aircraft that can be applied to every component within it.
"What this meant," says Ovens, "is that everything fits perfectly first time. That is a huge advance and produces major savings in production costs." The system is also used for generating technical publications, running mannequin models to check maintenance access, checking systems functionality, detecting clashes and providing production support. For the A400M, the Catia v5 system will be used throughout, says Ovens.
Since becoming part of a single integrated company, Airbus UK has become visibly more of an Airbus operation, with all of the Airbus-related factories carrying the Airbus logo. "We feel very much part of Airbus," says Paterson, "and we're very proud of our contribution to it."
JULIAN MOXON / LONDON
Source: Flight International