Transforming Aerospace Factories – Transcript
In this first episode of a new series on Talking Aerospace Today about the role of smart manufacturing in aerospace and defense, Todd Tuthill explores the root causes behind the industry’s push for higher-volume production and the challenges in getting there. Listen to the episode or see below for the transcript.
Patty Russo: Greetings, and welcome to Talking Aerospace Today from Siemens Digital Industries Software. I’m Patty Russo and I’m responsible for aerospace and defense marketing vertical here at Siemens and your host for this podcast. Thank you for joining us. Today, we’re kicking off our first new topic of the year, digital transformation of manufacturing in the A&D industry. Many sectors in the industry, including a breadth of companies that produce components, aim to increase their production volumes and get their products, components, and aircraft to market faster. That’s what we all want, right?
Patty Russo: We’re excited today to welcome our guest with expertise in the A&D industry and we are going to explore challenges around many facets of manufacturing that A&D companies face. We’ll explore ways that smart manufacturing, adaptive production, and other technologies can positively impact manufacturing processes, efficiency, costs, quality, again, all those things that we need and want in the industry. To start, let’s welcome back our Vice President of Aerospace, Defense and Marine here at Siemens. Good to see you again, Todd.
Todd Tuthill: Good to see you, too. Great to be back on the podcast for this very interesting topic. I’m really looking forward to the conversation today.
Patty Russo: Indeed, I am as well. So let’s get started. The first thing that I’d like to talk about is this push for higher volume production in the industry. Let’s start by exploring some of the reasons behind this push. What’s happening in the market and or the industry that’s driving this. Like, is this push being felt globally? Is it isolated geographically? More specifically, what’s causing it?
Todd Tuthill: Great question and great setup. So let’s do a little history, because listeners of the show know I like to talk a little history to set things up. And let’s look at where we’ve come because, you know, what an incredible industry we’re a part of. And if you think about the, maybe just go back 10, 15 years in aerospace. Everything that flew, everything that was built was flown by a person. It was what we call crewed. And we talk about drones and drones that are kind of the slang word, but we’ll talk on this podcast about a crewed aircraft and an uncrewed aircraft, and nearly everything that flew was flown by a real person. And even if you think about some of the toy aircraft that maybe we all used as kids 20, 30, 40 years ago, depending on your age, even that was flown kind of remotely piloted by a person. But now we’re talking about really uncrewed vehicles, and if you think about the advancement in technology we have today, it’s pretty incredible.
Todd Tuthill: Let me give you a couple examples. Okay, so things we can do in our modern world that a couple decades ago we thought were impossible. I can, in some major cities now, I can pick up my phone call for a pizza and the pizza’s delivered by a drone dropped right at my front door. Pretty incredible, drones that can fly through neighborhoods. I can even go to an online retail like Amazon and order something, and I used to think that, you know, getting it with Prime in two days was, wow. I get it in two days. That’s insane. Well, now in some cities I can get it in two hours or less. Again delivered by drones. So we have small drones that deliver those things. Uncrewed, obviously, because they’re small. But there’s a lot more to it than just these little drones we see flying over our houses, sometimes in cities.
Todd Tuthill: There’s this incredible company called Zipline. They create these drones that have done for the last several years incredible things. If you go to their website, you’ll see their drones have flown a billion miles already and delivered 15,000,000 items, and they’re doing these really cool things in in countries like Africa. They’re delivering blood supplies in places where there are no roads and there are no runways and according to their website, they’ve had a 51% reduction in maternal deaths in Rwanda because of their product. Now that, as cool as delivering pizza in 15 minutes is to my front door, reducing deaths of mothers and newborns by 51 percent is way cooler. That’s a cool thing in technology, but then we can go on to bigger drones.
Todd Tuthill: Again, I’ll talk about Boeing. Boeing has an uncrewed aircraft, now called MQ-25. It can do something that many consider the most difficult thing in aerospace. It can land on an aircraft carrier autonomously, and you can go back and, you know, watch the Top Gun movie about aircraft carriers and things. But you read about that, pilots will tell you landing on an aircraft carrier, trapping a #3 wire is one of the toughest things in aerospace and Boeing’s developed a drone that can take off from an aircraft carrier, refuel another aircraft and come back and land by itself. Really cool things, and those exist in our world today. If we look forward in the future, we’ve got 6th Gen aircraft, you know, aircraft beyond the F22 and F35, and programs called NGAD programs called GCAP, internationally, globally, around the US, and around the world.
Todd Tuthill: And these, now we’re talking about these aircraft, we’re replacing a lot of capabilities of crewed aircraft with uncrewed drone aircraft. And again doing all kinds of things autonomously, and that’s driving all kinds of changes in our industry. And we talk on this podcast a lot, you can go back and listen to what we’ve talked about capabilities of aircraft like I just did, but I want to set the capabilities of the aircraft itself aside, and what we really want to talk about now, we really want to talk about the technology required to build these aircraft because that technology in many cases is just as cutting edge and just as innovative it takes to build the aircraft.
Todd Tuthill: That’s what the aircraft can do and the things that were, the things that financially this is driving these aircraft tend to be less expensive and they tend to, the cycle times tend to be much quicker. So that’s driving a real change in the industry and I’ll give you an example. If I think back to the beginning of my career in the late 80s, I started my career at McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis, and I spent some of my time in the factory. And as I went in the factory where we’re building F-15s, F-18s, 88Vs, if I looked around, it was 100% touch labor. It was real people installing the parts, installing the wire bundles, putting on the wings. There were no robots. There was no automation.
Todd Tuthill: There was no anything. And that kind of capital intensive investment in a large factory to build those kind of exquisite manned aircraft or crewed aircraft, that, that, that investment just doesn’t work for these smaller drones I talked about, like the MQ 25 or these things that will go along with the 6th Gen aircraft we talked about and many others. That requires a different kind of investment from a capital standpoint, far more automation and far more flexibility, and that’s really what’s driving a lot of this change in our industry. The move away from touch labor, to automation to reconfigurability. That’s really what we want to focus on in this next series of podcasts, so long answer to a simple question, Patty. But that kind of sets us up.
Patty Russo: Yeah. So I have a follow up. This is the maybe obvious question. Is it just, quote unquote, just drones that are driving this push for higher volume? And is this an issue globally?
Todd Tuthill: It’s not just drones. We could talk about satellites. We could talk about anything that, think about it, from the perspective of me, it’s not about the product so much as the volume of the product and we’ll talk about that a lot in this series too. And again, it gets to you know, if you think about the number of manned aircraft that tend to get produced to produce a certain, create a certain thing. Let’s talk about F-35s and the global proliferation of F-35s around the world and how many thousands of those will be produced.
Todd Tuthill: There’s a lot of discussion about 6th Gen aircraft and I don’t think we know exactly how many we’ll build, but I’m very confident it won’t be nearly as many as we build F35. And a lot of the capability that you see in a 5th Gen aircraft like an F-35 will be replaced in the 6th Gen model with a drone. So that that’s just an example, and those drones, because they’re less expensive, we can afford to have a lot more of them. But as you say, it’s not just drones. We could talk about that in terms of satellites. The number of satellites that are just exploding across the, you know, especially low Earth orbit right now, to do things like deliver Internet.
Todd Tuthill: But it could be drones. It could be satellites. It could be a lot of things. I just chose drones as an example use case to talk about in this podcast, but no, it’s not just drones. And yes, it is global. Seeing it across the world. This is not just a US thing.
Patty Russo: Yeah and exploding satellites, not literally. Satellites exploding. Sorry.
Todd Tuthill: So maybe a maybe a bad choice. Good point.
Patty Russo: It’s OK.
Todd Tuthill: So we can laugh about it. We don’t want our satellites to explode. The growth of delivery in satellites. You’re right.
Patty Russo: No, no worries there.
Todd Tuthill: We don’t want our satellites to explode. That’s bad.
Patty Russo: So back on track. So let’s follow up with the idea that drones are the volume that is going to be needed for producing drones and some of these other products in the industry. What are some of the key issues and challenges that customers are facing that is inhibiting them across the industry to get to that higher volume? Is there any one part of the industry that’s more challenging than the other?
Todd Tuthill: Well, I think certainly the, I’ll say the real money side, the business side of the industry, the factories. It’s a real challenge because when you think about, again depending on the size and complexity of the drone, or the uncrewed aircraft, maybe it is the smaller ones that deliver the pizzas are certainly much simpler and easier to design than the large exclusive ones like the MQ-25 that flies off an aircraft carrier. But if we talk about, kind of restrict our discussion here to the larger, more complex ones, the design cycle can be similar to a crewed aircraft in terms of what it’s planned to do. It doesn’t need a cockpit, but complexity in the design, but the real difference comes when we talk about volume, because each aircraft gets designed, you know, basically designed once and then you build copies.
Todd Tuthill: You know, it’s harder than that, but at a high level, that’s what we’re talking about here. And the number of copies that we’re going to make of uncrewed aircraft will probably be much higher than the number of copies we’re going to make of crewed aircraft. So therefore it changes the way factories are developed. Also, if you think about the scope of what these uncrewed aircraft or drones will do, a crewed aircraft might have to pack in every sensor, every capability you can have to do all these different missions. That’s the way the aircraft is designed, the way the aircraft is built. So you’re kind of building one particular version or just a few, but if you think about a drone, a drone is going to have many, many, many different missions.
Todd Tuthill: Refueling here. Reconnaissance here. Other kinds of things, and each version of that drone changes in manufacturing. So that causes, that drives a need to have a very reconfigurable manufacturing facility or manufacturing assembly line. And this idea of in the past of, you know, certainly we build aircraft on assembly line, but we’re building the same thing. And when you change the way an aircraft is built, you know, it may look kind of the same way on the outside in terms of the outer mold line, but you’re changing what goes into it. You’re changing how the wiring’s laid out, you’re changing how maybe sensors and things are installed in the fuselage and the wings.
Todd Tuthill: And that can have a very significant impact on the way these vehicles are built. And it’s very expensive to reconfigure an assembly line the old traditional way, when it was all done by hand and hard tooling. And we need ways, if we’re going to produce these drones, which cost quite a bit less money than a crewed aircraft, which means there’s lower margins on that., if we’re going to produce those at a profit, we need to come up with a way to manufacture them in a much more flexible way, in a much faster way in a much cheaper way.
Todd Tuthill: And that’s really, I think what’s driving from my perspective, what’s driving a real change in the industry in our approach to manufacturing. It’s again, it’s back to what we said. It’s volume. It’s volume and it’s for, I guess in some extent, variety, too, in what these things are called to do, and how they’re going to work. It’s both.
Patty Russo: Thank you, Todd. This has been a great start to our topic. Unfortunately, however, we are out of time for today. But we’ll be back soon to discuss more about transformation of manufacturing for aerospace and defense. Thank you to our listeners for joining us. We will see you the next time on Talking Aerospace Today.
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