But that scenario is not the only possibility – and there is a “real risk” that aerospace companies could abandon or delay next-generation aircraft projects, according to Aziz Tahiri, vice-president for global industry at Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence.
“What we hear is that a lot of aerospace manufacturers are struggling with how much it costs to design a new system,” he told Professional Engineering recently, following the metrology-focused company’s appearance at the Paris Air Show in June. “It requires a lot of [experimentally capable] people, but also complex materials, complex systems and structures – and all of that has become really expensive, also with the tariffs.”
While manufacturers have always had to balance fulfilling current orders with designing innovative new systems that might not return investment for 15-20 years, Tahiri stressed the need for companies to streamline their processes to continue next-gen projects in the challenging economic environment.
Another shift – much more pressing for many in the industry – is a massive production ramp-up, with a 20% year-on-year increase required to meet the huge demand for new planes.
Yet both of these trends are at risk due to an ongoing labour shortage, said Tahiri. In the UK, for example, where Hexagon’s manufacturing intelligence division is headquartered, there are more than 10,000 vacancies in the aerospace, defence, space and security sectors, according to ADS Group.
“It's very difficult to hire new people, new engineers,” said Tahiri, who is based in Toulouse, France. “It’s not only labour, because sometimes we have the people but we don’t have the skills – again because aerospace is a very complex industry, a very fragmented supply chain.”
Quality inspections – a key part of aircraft manufacturing and maintenance – are often still very manual processes, Tahiri said, with engineers required to walk around parts and fuselages to find defects and “scratch the surface with their fingers to see how important it is”. But with pressure on skills and a need to ramp up production, he said companies are switching to proactive and predictive inspections, using automated inspection to digitise the surface of components and enable post-treatment analysis.
Products released by Hexagon at the recent air show included the new ATS800 laser tracker, designed to scan aircraft from much further away than was previously possible. Replacing visual inspections or ones that require much closer scanning, Tahiri said the tracker offers 50-micron accuracy from up to 40 metres away.
“It's a breakthrough in this world of inspection,” he said. “You can capture almost half an aircraft [from] just one single location with that device. Out of the scanning, you get a… virtual representation of a surface that you can run quality inspection on, but also statistical analytics. [You can] leverage the data beyond just the quality inspection needs.”
The technology, which unlike other systems does not require mirrors to be placed on the fuselage surface, uses a combination of a high-definition camera and laser sensing to prevent inaccuracies. It uses self-correction software to enable high accuracy and a non-cylindrical beam shape.
The company, which is partnered with firms including Nvidia and Microsoft, also recently released Maestro, a smaller tracking device for components such as turbine blades.
The device uses an automated metrology software suite, which allows “non-experts” to determine how to inspect parts, including loading in CAD designs to generate inspection paths.
“For any operator engineer, you can get a short training [course], two weeks training on what the machine can do,” Tahiri said. “You can automatically generate all the tool paths and the software configuration to inspect the part with the Maestro machine. So the software is really about making it easy for engineers to inspect parts, and that combination of software and hardware allows us to save almost 30% of programming and inspection time.”
Hexagon hopes the new tools could have an important role to play as manufacturers develop new systems. Considering the pressures on the industry, Tahiri predicted that new fuel-efficient engines had a better chance of taking off than new fuselage designs.
“Rather than a completely new aircraft, we might see an aircraft that looks like the ones we have today, maybe with lighter structures based on composites,” he said. “We might see a lot of enhanced aerodynamics, more electrical systems, also replacing hydraulic systems, things like that. But I'm not sure the aircraft of tomorrow will look very different.”
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.