#aircraft manufacturing

[zohasen]

High-Performance Adhesives for Aircraft Manufacturing

In the aerospace industry, the demand for high-performance adhesives has never been greater. As aircraft designs evolve, the need for materials that can withstand extreme conditions while ensuring structural integrity and safety is paramount. High-performance adhesives have become integral to aircraft manufacturing, providing exceptional strength, durability, and reliability.

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For more information about our high-performance adhesives, visit Kohesi Bond.

[worldspotlightnews]

Airbus widens its lead over Boeing in China with plans for second finishing line there | CNN Business

New York CNN  —  Airbus announced plans Thursday for a second final-assembly line in China, the latest sign that it has a lock on the key aviation market over rival Boeing. The announcement came as part of a state visit by French President Emmanuel Macron to China. The signing of the agreement by Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury was witnessed by Chinese President Xi Jinping and by Macron. It will…

[afrotumble]

The Russian Jet That Fights for Both Sides | Air & Space Magazine| Smithsonian Magazine

[c1qfxugcgy0]

adventures in aerospace

So I recently started working at Large Aircraft Manufacturer. (LAM) The plant I work at employs 30,000 people. The company as a whole employs 170,000. Usually you only hear about LAM when something goes wrong. But no matter how bumbling it seems from the outside, it's way worse on the inside.

Three months after my first day, I have been "graduated" from "training." In reality, I'm still completely worthless on the floor: the training center has given me a paltry subset of the production certificates I need to actually to do my assigned job. A commonly cited statistic at LAM is that a hundred men a day are retiring, each one representing decades of experience, walking out the door, forever. The training center is in the unenviable position of managing a generational replacement, and have resorted to shoveling heaps of zoomers through as fast as possible. (As one of the few people with a visible hairline and who is not wearing a Roblox graphic tee; I am frequently mistaken for an instructor, and asked where the bathroom is, what time the next class starts, etc)

In theory, the training center knows what shop I'm assigned to, and can simply assign me all the required classes. In practice, they do the absolute minimum amount of training in a desperate attempt to relive the crowding in their handful of computer labs and tell graduates to pick up their certs later.

Of course, the irresistible force of the schedule meets the immovable object of the FAA. If you don't have the required production certificate to perform a particular job, you don't touch the airplane. Full stop, end of story.

And so the curtain opens on the stage. It reveals a single senior mechanic, supervising a mechanic who finally received all the certs and is being qualified on this particular job, surrounded by another three trainees. Trainees are less than nothing, absolute scum. At best we can fetch and carry. Mostly we are expected to stay out of the way. And the senior mechanic is only senior in title. He is one of six assembler-installers who is certified to actually work on the plane, out of twenty people on the crew, and spends every day with a permanent audience. He is 23 years old.

("Mechanic"? If you think the jargon at your job is bad, try joining a company that's a century old. Assembler-installers are universally referred to as "mechanics", despite doing work that's nothing like what a car mechanic does, and who are generally paid far worse than FAA certified A&P mechanics. Mechanics are the 11 bravos of LAM, grunts, the single largest category of worker. The tip of the spear. Hooah!)

Large Aircraft Manufacturer is in a dilly of a pickle. All of its existing airframe designs are hilariously antiquated. It tried designing a brand new plane from a clean sheet, and lost billions of dollars to a decade-long integration hell. After that, to save money, it tried just tacking bigger engines on an older design without changing anything else, and the stupid things plowed into the ground in an excruciatingly public manner.

LAM is now trying a middle road. It is upgrading one of its designs that is merely middle aged, rather than ancient, and with proven, de-risked components built in-house, rather than scattering them to subcontractors across the world. And it's still blowing past deadlines and burning billions of dollars LAM really doesn't have to spare.

This is the program I've been assigned to.

Advanced Midbody - Carbon Wing has taken the bold step of just tacking on carbon fiber wings to a conventional aluminum fuselage. Shockingly, AMCW is now stuck in lightning strike testing, due to that troublesome join between conductive aluminum and conductive...ish carbon fiber. But LAM, confident as ever, or perhaps driven by complaints of its customers, has announced that full rate production will begin just next year. Thus the tide of newhires. According to the schedule, we're supposed to jerk from one wingset a month to one wingset a week. That's not going to happen, but, oh well, orders from above move down at the speed of thought, while reality only slowly trickles upwards.

"120 inch pounds? Really?"

I startle upright. I have observed one hundred pi bracket installs, and I will observe a hundred more before I can touch aircraft structure. This is the first disagreement I've witnessed. A more advanced trainee is questioning the torque spec on a fastener. It is not an entirely foolish question-- most sleeve bolts we use are in the 40 in-pounds range. Doubling it that is unusual. I cough the dust off my unused vocal cords and venture an opinion.

"Well hey I could look it up? I guess"

The lead mechanic glances at me, surprised that I'm still awake, then looks away. Excuse enough for me!

I unfold myself from the stool I've been sitting on for the last four hours then hobble over to the nearest Shared Production Workstation.

We do not get Ikea-style step by step instructions on how to put together the airplane. Like any company that's been around for long enough, LAM is a tangled wad of scar tissue, ancient responses to forgotten trauma. If you state a dimension twice, in two different places, then it is possible for an update to only change one of those dimensions, thereby making the engineering drawing ambiguous. Something real bad must have happened in the past as a result of that, so now an ironclad rule is that critical information is only stated once, in one place, a single source of truth.

As a result, the installation plan can be a little... vague. Step 040 might be something like "DRILL HOLE TO SIZE AND TORQUE FASTENERS TO SPEC". What hole size? What torque spec?

Well, they tell you. Eventually.

(Image from public Google search)

You are given an engineering drawing, and are expected to figure out how things go together yourself. (Or, more realistically, are told how it's done by coworkers) Step by step instructions aren't done because then dozens of illustrations would have to be updated with every change instead of just one, and drawings are updated surprisingly frequently.

Fasteners are denoted by a big plus sign, with a three letter fastener code on the left and the diameter on the right, like so: "XNJ + 8"

To get the actual part number, we go to the fastener callout table:

(Note the use of a trade name in the table above. There is nothing a mechanic loves more than a good trademark. Permanent straight shank fasteners are always called HI-LOKs™. It's not a cable tie, it's a Panduit™. It's not a wedgelock, it's a Cleco™. Hey man, pass me that offset drill. What, you mean a Zephyr™? Where'd the LAMlube™ go? This also means you have to learn the names of everything twice, one name on the installation plan, and one name it's referred to in conversation.)

We find XNJ on that table, and fill in the diameter: BACB30FM8A. Now we look up the spec table for that fastener:

The eagle eyed among you might note that there is no "diameter: 8" on that table. As a LAM mechanic, you are expected to simply know that "diameter" is measured in 32nds of an inch, which simplifies down to 1/4.

(LAM preserves many old-school skills like fraction reduction and memorizing decimal equivalents like this, like flies caught in amber. Not least is the universal use of Imperial units. Many American manufacturers have been browbeaten into adding parenthetical conversions. Not LAM! Any risk at all of a mechanic seeing a second number and using it by accident is too great, and anyway, it violates SSOT. Lengths are in inches and feet, weights are in pounds, volume is in gallons and if you don't like it then you can go eat shit!)

After 10 minutes of following references, I arrive at that table, print it off, highlight the correct row, and hand it off to my senior mechanic.

"Great, thanks."

Gratified that I have enhanced shareholder value, I sit back down, and immediately fall asleep. Another day living the dream.

(next post in this series)

[whilomm]

these are claims from a different whistleblower than the one that was totally not murdered by boeing

(disclaimer, im not an expert and this article doesnt go into a ton of detail on the specific issues, so i could be a lil off, these are very much non-expert speculation rambles. anyone who understands better, feel free to correct me/add more deets).

if im reading it right these claims get into the way boeing has been outsourcing more and more manufacturing of parts to other companies, such as for the fuselage (the plane body as a whole, big tube u sit in). if those parts dont quite fit together right (and keep in mind the margins of error on these things can be VERY small in some cases, though im not sure exactly how much wiggle room they got here), that can lead to too much stress on certain parts.

like, for example, if one part of the fuselage is just baaaarely too big for the next part it connects to, it might all seem to fit together perfectly fine, but every time it takes off and lands or goes thru compression cycles (that is when they take off and land, going from low pressure-high pressure-low pressure), it just puts a BIT too much pressure on where they join. and over the years, that pressure just adds up until theres microscopic stress fractures, which become slightly larger stress fractures, until they get big enough that once a plane reaches a high enough altitude theres a midair disentegration, which is. exactly as bad as it sounds.

(sidenote: compression cycles can be more important for determining an airplanes lifespan than flight hours. the usual metaphor is bending a paperclip back and forth until it breaks, how many times can you bend it before metal fatigue sets in and it just snaps. holding it in a more bent position however will take a lot longer to snap it generally.)

now to be clear, every single plane has an intended service life, and its well known that planes can only take so many compression cycles before they start to get really hard to maintain without going kablooey. a plane may be rated for like, idk, 50k compression cycles (so, taking off and landing 50k times before its retired, because after that its no longer worth the maintenance vs just making a new plane). but if it turns out that plane has some flaw in its build that means itll develop fatal stress factures at only 20k cycles, well. thats bad. not sure exactly how the schedule on looking for stress factures looks like for maintenece crews (do they do it regularly for all planes on a set schedule? do they only do it occasionally for new planes, and start to ramp up checks as the plane gets older? dunno!) but well. generally speaking, a plane having a fatal flaw that gives it an explosive midlife crisis is Bad. i would hope theyd catch it! but i dont know enough about the deets of fuselage maintenence to know the specifics.

and OH YAY COMPOSITE MATERIALS. now, before anyone gets too freaked out thinking about the uh. submarine. use of composite materials is actually far more common on planes than on subs for a buncha reasons. one, planes just generally undergo a lot less in terms of pressure (that futurama joke, "this spaceship can handle between one and zero atmospheres", vs subs that have to deal with tens to potentially hundreds of atmospheres) but also because apparently, for complicated material engineering reasons, composite materials work much better under tension (high pressure INSIDE pushing OUT, like airplane) than under compression (high pressure OUTSIDE pushing IN, like submarine). heres a vid from someone who wrote their masters on composite materials under compression if you wanna hear from someone slightly smarter on the subject. im not gonna pretend like i understand the full deets, but "composites do OKAY with tension" is enough for me, go read the fancy scientific papers if you want more.

now, so that people do freak out at least a little bit: hm. dont like that they are using Way More Composite Than Usual on this plane. how much is the usual? idk, i assume composites are much more popular with low altitude small aircraft (bc well, weight and less pressure worries), dunno whats considered normal for high altitude longhaul crafts. but, apparently, the dreamliner is "more than usual". which, yeah cool, lighter weight airplanes use less fuel which is better for longhaul flights. is it. well tested enough though???

...anyway. im not an engineer, idk the full Deets, but well. havin lotsa fun hearing the engineers talk about how the parts of the giant metal skybirds dont fit together quite right and theyre using materials that fail more catastrophically than metal with less warning, experimentally, and we dont quiiiite have the data to know if. its a problem. thats really fun! LOVE hearing about how much theyre outsourcing parts, given how bad quality control of things as tiny as the titanium in some bolts or a little bit of the engine blades being not properly vacuum forged has lead to catastrophic failure in the past, and knowing how important sourcing of parts in airplanes is. all VERY yay!

[postcard-from-the-past]

Argosy Mk I of Imperial Airways, three-engine biplane airliner designed by the Armstrong Whitworth Aircraft manufacturer

British vintage postcard

[supplyside]

Northrup Grumman CVN 77 HW Bush construction

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Boosting rocket reliability at the material level

Zack Cordero’s research focuses on extending the lifespan of reusable rockets, while simultaneously reducing the risk of catastrophic failure.

The success of the SpaceX Falcon 9 reusable launch vehicle has been one of the most remarkable technological achievements of the last decade. Powered by SpaceX’s Merlin engine, the Falcon 9 booster can be reused over 10 times, with minimal maintenance between flights. Now there is a new generation of reusable rocket engines and vehicles that promise much larger payloads and greater reuse. Unlike Falcon 9, the 390-foot-tall SpaceX Starship, powered by its new Raptor engines, can land both the booster and the second stage for reuse, thereby further reducing launch costs. Blue Origin has its own next-generation BE-4 engine that will power its 320-foot New Glenn launch vehicle. “The new class of reusable launch vehicles is likely to transform the space industry by lowering launch costs and improving space accessibility,” says Zack Cordero, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. “This will enable applications such as mega constellations for space-based internet and space-based sensing for things like persistent, real-time CO2 emissions monitoring.”

Read more.

[moderncalculators]

Empowering Financial Decisions with Modern Calculators: Your Key to Financial Success

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[thinkingimages]

De Havilland DH106 Comet 1 (GALVG)

The De Havilland Aircraft Company DH106 Comet was the World’s first pressurised commercial jet airliner and it was the source of enormous national pride. Its introduction into BOAC service in May 1952, was greeted as the dawning of a new age in passenger travel.

[beetle3000-1]

Pleased to let the general population know that in aircraft manufacturing, turning the plane off and on again is indeed still a valid and first-step method of troubleshooting

[c1qfxugcgy0]

adventures in QA

(previous post in this series)

My shop in Advanced Midbody - Carbon Wing (AMCW) at Large Aircraft Manufacturer (LAM) is at the very end of the composite fabrication building. Hundreds of people carefully lay up a hundred foot long slab of carbon fiber, cure it, paint it, and then we totally fuck it up with out of spec holes, scrapes, primer damage, etc. The people who write up our many defects are from the Quality Assurance (QA) department.

Every single screw and rivet on a LAM aircraft can be traced back to the mechanic who installed it. Back when even everything was done in pen and pencil, it was joked that the paper used to produce an aircraft outweighed the plane itself. Now that everything is computer-based, of course, the amount of paperwork is free to grow without limit.

(Haunting the factory is endless media coverage of an emergency exit door plug popping out of an Advanced Smallbody - Upengine (ASU) plane during a routine flight a few months ago. Unlike that airframe's notorious problems with MCAS, this was a straightforward paperwork screwup by a line worker: the bolts were supposed to be tightened, and they weren't.

As a result the higher ups have visited hideous tribulations on non-salaried workers. Endless webinars, structured trainings. Here at the Widebody plant we have received a steady flow of refugees from the Narrowbody factory, hair-raising tales of receiving one hundred percent supervision from the moment they clock in to the second they clock out from FAA inspectors who can recommend actual jail time for any lapse in judgement.)

A single hydraulic bracket Installation Plan (IP) is around four brackets. The team leads generally assign two bracket IPs per mechanic, since each bracket set is something like a foot apart, and while working on the plane is bad enough it's much worse to have another mechanic in your lap.

Let me list the order of operations:

One: Find where you're supposed to install these brackets. This is harder than you might think.

Firstly, it's a hundred foot long plank of carbon fiber composite, with longitudinal stringers bonded to it to add stiffness. The stringers are pilot drilled in the trim and drill center, a truly Brobdingnagian CNC mill that trims off the composite flash at the edges and locates and drills part holes for us. But there's a lot of holes, so you must carefully find your set.

A minor difficulty is that the engineering drawings are laid out with the leading edge pointing up, while the wing panels in our cells hang from the trailing edge. Not so bad, you just rotate the paper 180 when orienteering, then rotate it back up to read the printed labels.

A major difficulty is that the drawings are from the perspective from the outside of the panel. But we work on the inside of the wing (obviously, that's where all the parts are installed) so we also flip the drawings and squint through the back of the paper, to make things line up.

Large Aircraft Manufacturer has a market cap of US$110 billion, and we're walking around the wing jig with sheets of paper rotated 180 and flipped turnways trying to find where to put brackets.

Oh well, we're paid by the hour.

Two: Match drill the aluminum brackets to the carbon fiber composite stringer. I can devote an entire post to the subtleties of drilling carbon fiber, but I can already tell that this post is going to be a miserable slog, so I will merrily skip over this step.

Three: Vacuum up all the carbon dust and aluminum swarf created during this process. This step is not optional, as your team lead will remind you, his screaming mouth clouding your safety glasses with spittle at a distance of four inches. LAM is very serious about FOD. Every jet airliner you've ever ridden in is a wet wing design-- each interstitial space is filled with Jet A. There is no fuel bladder or liner-- the fuel washes right over plane structure and wing hardware. Any dirt we leave behind will merrily float into the fuel and be sucked right into the engines, where it can cause millions in damage. No place for metal shavings!

If you are nervous about flying, avoid considering that all the hydraulic lines and engine control cables dip into a lake of a kerosene on their way from the flight deck to the important machines they command. Especially do not consider that we're paid about as much per hour as a McDonalds fry cook to install flight-critical aviation components.

Four: Neatly lay out your brackets on your cart, fight for a position at a Shared Production Workstation (SPW) (of which we have a total of four (4) for a crew of thirty (30) mechanics) and mark your IP for QA inspection as Ready To Apply Seal.

Four: Twiddle your thumbs. Similarly, we have three QA people for thirty mechanics. This is not enough QA people, as I will make enormously clear in the following steps.

Five: Continue waiting. Remember, you must not do anything until a QA person shows up and checks the box. Skipping a QA step is a “process failure” and a disciplinary offense. From the outside, you can observe the numerous QA whistleblowers and say “golly, why would a mechanic ever cut a corner and ignore QA?” Well...

Six: QA shows up. Theoretically, they could choose to pick up the mahrmax you prepared for them and gauge every single hole you've drilled. But since we're three hours into the shift and they're already twenty jobs behind, they just flick their flashlight across the panel and say “looks good" and then sprint away. Can't imagine why our planes keep falling out of the sky.

Seven: Apply the seal to the bracket. P/S 890 is a thick dark gray goop that adheres well to aluminum, carbon fiber, fabric, hair and skin. Once cured, it is completely immune to any chemical attack short of piranha solution, so if you get any on yourself you had better notice quick, otherwise it'll be with you as long as the layer of epidermis it's bonded to. LAM employees who work with fuel tank sealant very quickly get out of the habit of running their hands through their hair.

Eight: Now you wait again. Ha ha, you dumb asshole, you thought you were done with QA? No no, now you put up the job for QA inspection of how well you put the seal on the bracket. Twiddle your thumbs, but now with some urgency. The minute you took the bottle of seal out of the freezer, you started the clock on its "squeeze-out life." For this type of seal, on this job, it's 120 minutes. If QA doesn't get to you before that time expires, you remove your ticket, wipe off the seal, take another bottle out the freezer, and apply a fresh layer.

Nine: Optimistically, QA shows up in time and signs off on the seal. Well, you're 100 minutes into your 120 minute timer. Quickly, you slap the brackets onto the stringer, air hammer the sleeve bolts into position, thread nuts onto the bolts, then torque them down. Shove through the crowd and mark your IP "ready to inspect squeeze out"

Ten: Let out a long breath and relax. All the time sensitive parts are over. The criteria here is "visible and continuous" squeeze out all along the perimeter of the bracket and the fasteners. It is hard to screw this up, just glop on a wild excess of seal before installing it. If you do fail squeezeout, though, the only remedy is to take everything off, throw away the single-use distorted thread locknuts, clean everything up and try again tomorrow.

Eleven: QA approved squeeze out? Break's over, now we're in a hurry again. By now there's probably only an hour or two left in the shift, and your job now is to clean off all that squeeze out. Here's where you curse your past self for glopping on too much seal. You want to get it off ASAP because if you leave it alone or if it's too late in the shift and your manager does feel like approving overtime it'll cure to a rock hard condition overnight and you'll go through hell chipping it off the next day. You'll go through a hundred or so qtips soaked in MPK cleaning up the bracket and every surface of the panel within three feet.

Twelve: Put it up for final inspection. Put away all your tools. (The large communal toolboxes are lined with kaizen foam precisely cut out to hold each individual tool, which makes it obvious if any tool is missing. When you take a tool out, you stick a tool chit with your name and LAMID printed on it in its place. Lose a tool? Stick your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye, pal, because the default assumption is that a lost screwdriver is lurking in a hollow "hat" stringer, waiting to float out and damage some critical component years after the airplane is delivered.)

One tool you'll leave on your cart, however, is the pin protrusion gage. There is a minimum amount of thread that must poke outside of the permanent straight shank fastener's (Hi-Lok) nut, to indicate that the nut is fully engaged. That makes sense. But there's also a maximum protrusion. Why?

Well, it's an airplane. Ounces make pounds. An extra quarter inch of stickout across a thousand fasteners across a 30 year service life means tons of additional fuel burnt. So you can't use a fastener that's too long, because it adds weight.

On aluminum parts, it's hard to mess up. But any given composite part is laid up from many layers of carbon fiber tape. The engineers seemed to have assumed that dimensional variation would be normally distributed. But, unfortunately, we buy miles of carbon fiber at a time, and the size only very gradually changes between lots. When entire batches are several microns oversize, and you're laying up parts from fifty plies and an inch thick, you can have considerable variation of thickness on any given structural component. So you had better hope you had test fit all of your fasteners ahead of time, or else you'll be real sorry!

And, if you're really lucky, QA will show up five minutes before end of shift, pronounce everything within tolerance, then fuck off.

And that's how it takes eight hours to install eight brackets.

[dhaatufabex]

Aluminium Automobile Part Manufacturers

Dhaatu Fabex is a trusted name among Aluminium Automobile Part Manufacturers, offering high-quality, lightweight, and durable components for vehicles and aircraft. We focus on delivering reliable solutions that enhance performance and efficiency. With advanced technology and expert craftsmanship, our products meet industry standards and customer needs. Dhaatu Fabex is your go-to choice for precision-engineered aluminum parts. For More Details Visit Us.

[defencecapital]

JSW Defence to invest $90 million to bring American Shield AI's fixed-wing drone to India

By N. C. Bipindra Mumbai: Indian firm JSW Defence Private Limited, part of the US$24-billion JSW Group, today announced a “strategic partnership” with Shield AI Inc., a leading American defence technology company, to indigenise and manufacture Shield AI’s ‘V-BAT‘ fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) in India. “This collaboration marks a significant step in boosting India’s defence…