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The Yeovil site is making sure it stays at the leading edge of helicopter manufacturing. Ian Parker spoke to Leonardo’s business development and capability manager, Tom Egan at the company’s Yeovil site.

Recent months have seen Leonardo deliver AW159 helicopters to the Philippine Navy and win a contract from Poland for the AW101 for anti-submarine and CSAR duties. At the Paris Airshow last June, Leonardo exhibited an AW139, outfitted in a public-utility configuration. The AW139 has proven to be extremely popular, with 270 customers ordering over 1100 helicopters, making it the most successful aircraft in its class worldwide, says the company. Are these and other successes putting pressure on production in the UK?

“We have the ability to tune our lines up and down,” begins Egan. “The nature of our markets means we tend to get peaks and troughs in the order book. We like volume. It gives us economies of scale; we can look at how we optimise production for higher volumes but we’re not going to run out of factory space or machining capability.’

The company operates a shift system. Mostly, it operates two shifts, but it can go to three shifts if needed. It is used to dealing with fluctuations and doesn’t anticipate any issues with forecast market demand. Partly, this is because Leonardo is highly active in training.

“We’re training people in terms of apprentices, business trainees and graduates. Thinking in terms of manufacturing, there’s high competition for some skill sets, and being here in Yeovil, can sometimes be another barrier in that there isn’t a multitude of people sitting on our doorstep, waiting for us to recruit them.

“But we do offer cutting edge capability and an attractive place to come and work. People know they are going to be using the most advanced machine tools, they’re going to be working on exciting products, and they’re going to be pushing their technical capabilities and learning new skills. We also focus on upskilling our current workforce.

“We do try to forecast future market demand and adjust our capacity to suit. Looking further ahead, we’re mindful of the fact that with Industry 4.0 there’s a growth in demand for digital skills and that will provide us with some challenges. But we see this more as an opportunity because we use highly capable operators who do the programming on quite sophisticated machines, on sophisticated parts.”

Egan adds that the operators have more time and they can apply their thinking to higher level tasks which puts emphasis on the interface between design and manufacturing. The knowledge flows both ways. The manufacturing engineers work closely with the design engineers to optimise the whole process.

“We don’t have design for pure performance of the product which is then very difficult to manufacture,” he says.

Taking on the digital challenge

Egan sits on the South West Digital Skills Pilot Team with the Local Enterprise Partnership. This is looking at everything from STEM through to industry, determining what skills sets will be needed.

“Increasingly we’re talking across sectors. In the High Value Design and Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund bid that has become the Brunel Challenge (that started with ourselves and Airbus in Filton, recognising that we had some unique capabilities) we go from the concept of a product to disposal and everything in between. If you lose that design link, that high value engineering link, you just become another manufacturing source and you compete on cost of labour, cost of manufacture. You risk becoming uncompetitive compared with low cost economies.

“We recognised that many of the other companies in aerospace – Rolls-Royce and GKN for example – shared our viewpoint. With many businesses these days being foreign-owned, decisions about investment and the future of locations are taken off-shore, therefore we have to make sure that we are constantly presenting a value offering. Look at some of the recent history with Honda and Nissan. We spoke to automotive, defence, marine and nuclear - they all had the same concerns.

“We have a great heritage in the UK in advanced engineering capability and we want to sustain and grow that. So increasingly we are working with the other sectors. I’m currently talking to Bentley Motors to see what synergy we can get from the digital journey that they’ve made. They produce about 10,000 cars a year so they’re more similar to us than Ford for example. We find we have a lot of similarities and a lot we can learn from each other.”

Leonardo made a conscious decision many years ago to move out of certain aspects of production where the supply chain was perfectly capable and perfectly competitive. It can supply many components, even though they may be build-to-print from Leonardo designs. Some 75 to 80% of its aircraft parts are sourced from the supply chain.

“We wanted to design and manufacture really important parts that were higher precision and more related to safety of flight. We talk about ‘tip to tip’ from the tip of the main rotor blades to the tip of the tail rotor blades, including transmission, the mast, the tail rotor drive shaft, etc. Anything in that train we manufacture ourselves.”

The company has a Centre of Excellence (CoE) for transmissions. In addition to manufacturing it also has a big transmission repair, overhaul and test facility on site.

“With TWI, we’ve been looking at cold spraying for building up castings for re-machining. We’ve been looking at friction stir welding and other techniques with repair technology in mind. The products that we design today will have service lives measured in decades.”

Machined parts are made to a very high standard, states Egan. “We manufacture to AGMA 13, whereas many of our competitors in the helicopter business manufacture to only AGMA 9 or 10. (AGMA is the American Gear Manufacturers Association which has developed quality standards for precision in gear tolerancing). We’re constantly investing in machine tools. For example, we’ve invested in new spiral bevel grinder machines such as the Klingelnburg, we’ve updated our turning cell with Mazaks and most recently a new Hofler grinder.’ This continual investment drives performance and capability growth, which together with our design capability sustains our leadership in advanced engineering and manufacturing.”

But what of additive manufacturing? “In producing critical parts, you tend to be limited in what additive manufacturing can give you as a process in the first place,” notes Egan. “For example, additive manufacturing gives you the capability to put hidden features inside the component as you build it, but if you can’t inspect it subsequently, certification becomes problematic.”

The company is working with the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, and it is a Tier 1 member at the National Composites Centre. It has a Dynamic Composite Components Facility - for blades, hubs and a whole range of other components, plus it makes its own electrical wiring looms. These CoEs are seen as strategic assets which together with the transmissions CoE, feed the final assembly lines not only in Yeovil, but in other Leonardo plants, aiding UK exports.

www.uk.leonardocompany.com/en/air/helicopters