SEATTLE—Boeing [BA] wants to scale up the digital engineering approach the company said it took with the U.S. Air Force T-7A Red Hawk trainer to other programs. Through simulation, the company would build the first few aircraft of a given type to work out design and production process kinks.
“For everything we do physically, we want to have a digital twin of that where we can predict the performance of what’s going to happen once we do it for real,” Greg Hyslop, Boeing’s chief engineer, told reporters. “The best example we’ve got of that in the very near term that shows the promise of this approach is the T-7 Red Hawk. The airplane was designed digitally, but what was more important was the program built the first several airplanes in a simulation to try out the build–how will things go together.”
Digital transformation “has many dimensions to it,” Hylsop said. “Exhibit A in how we did this is our T-7 Red Hawk that we’re currently building for the United States Air Force.”
Boeing said on April 28 that it unveiled the first T-7A Red Hawk trainer for the Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) phase at the company’s St. Louis plant (
Defense Daily, Apr. 28). The first EMD T-7A is to remain in St. Louis and undergo ground and flight tests before the plane’s delivery to the Air Force.
The company plans to build 351 T-7As for the U.S. Air Force to replace the 1960s-era Northrop T-38 Talon.
“For everything we do physically, we want to have a digital twin of that where we can predict the performance of what’s going to happen once we do it for real,” Hyslop said of the future Boeing production process. “The best example we’ve got of that in the very near term that shows the promise of this approach is the T-7 Red Hawk. The airplane was designed digitally, but what was more important was the program built the first several airplanes in a simulation to try out the build–how will things go together.”
The simulation improved the rigor of the physical joining of the forward and aft fuselages, Hyslop said.
Boeing builds the front section in St. Louis, while Saab builds the aft section in Sweden. Elbit Systems of America–a subsidiary of Israel’s Elbit Systems [ESLT]–builds the aircraft’s cockpit and embedded training system.
Boeing said on June 16 that it had fused the last of five T-7A aft and forward fuselages for EMD planes after Saab delivered the first rear section to Boeing in April last year. After joining the forward and aft sections in St. Louis, Boeing assembles the wings, fins, and tail for the T-7A. Saab now plans to move to U.S. production of the aft fuselage in West Lafayette, Ind.
Boeing’s St. Louis factory for the T-7A is “like a big empty room,” Hylsop said. “There’s no fixed tooling. There’s holding fixtures, but the part becomes the tool. That concept is revolutionary. You think about what that could mean for [reducing] the amount of capital investment, the flexibility it affords in a factory, any number of benefits. All of these things were manifested on this program and are being shown now, as that airplane goes through its flight test program and is starting to spool up into a production program.”
The 3-D printing of tools “has shown great promise on the commercial side for some parts,” Hyslop said. “Anything that reduces either the amount of tooling you need or the time to get the tooling is gonna help a development program because too many times I’ve gotta lock the design down early because I’ve gotta release the request for proposals for the tooling, and I end up locking the design down earlier than I need to. So, if I can keep the design process open longer because I don’t need the tooling or less time for the additional tooling, that is only gonna lead to a better product on the other end, if I’ve got more time to iterate on the design [and] less time required for the tooling.”
Boeing is investigating how to ramp up digital design and production for the company’s commercial planes.
“Our challenge is requirements for a military aircraft are different than they are for a large commercial airplane so how could this apply to a commercial airplane development program?” he said. “What we wanna do for our next commercial airplane is to say all the rigor we applied to the design of the airplane, we’re going to apply to the design of the production system that produces that airplane. We’re gonna connect those two models up through a definitive and authoritative engineering database so that when we see a change in the airplane, we can see its effect on the change in the factory or, if we need to change something in the factory, what would affect the design of the airplane, if there’s something that we’re asking the factory to do that can’t be done? The ability to do that with the same system engineering rigor, to my knowledge, has not been done before.”