Aircraft manufacturing demands the highest-quality materials, highly trained experts, rigorous quality control and precision processes that remain largely manual. These demands make it an ideal candidate for a digital reinvention.
Companies can take advantage of recent advances in automation technology and analytics to improve manufacturing speed and accuracy and reduce waste, making manufacturing cells (the groups of machines that work together on a task) more efficient and sustainable. With the expertise of a partner like Hitachi, aircraft manufacturers can combine major leaps in operating technology (OT) with integrated IT for a fully optimized environment.
Challenges abound
A prime example is the installation of nutplates, stamped sheet metal that affixes to a surface. A single-aisle commercial aircraft contains tens of thousands of nutplates. The manual installation of each nutplate takes three to four minutes. This process is repeated thousands of times over the life of the craft as plates are removed and reinstalled for routine maintenance. Until now, nutplate installation has been done manually, exposing manufacturers to risks including:
Human error: Over the course of tens of thousands of manual actions, mistakes are inevitable. The potential for error is compounded by the small size of nutplate components, which make them difficult to handle and increase the potential for mistakes.