The final assembly of complete aircraft usually requires a facility furnished with a network of overhead rails on which ride heavy-lift cranes capable of moving large portions of vehicles. Facility size is governed by vehicle dimensions; for example, Boeing’s plant in Everett, Washington, is the world’s largest building by volume, containing some 13.4 million cubic metres (473 million cubic feet) and covering an area of 405,000 square metres (4.4 million square feet). Airbus Industrie’s Final Assembly Complex Clément Ader, near Toulouse, France, although smaller, with 5.3 million cubic metres (187 million cubic feet), is Europe’s largest industrial building.
Aircraft assembly normally starts with the joining, or mating, of fuselage subassemblies that have been craned into a supporting jig or fixture. As the vehicle is assembled, it is moved through a succession of work stations, acquiring additional subassemblies and accumulating its onboard systems, ducts, control cables, and other interior plumbing. Light- and medium-weight aircraft may be moved on wheeled fixtures; heavier aircraft are craned. Modern large planes and spacecraft often are moved via an adaptation of the air-cushion technique. Highly compressed air is pumped into the assembly fixture supports and escapes downward through holes. The powerful thrust of the escaping air lifts the entire fixture and vehicle assembly several millimetres off the floor, enough to permit movement by tractor or human power. Major assembly steps include the additions of nose and tail sections, wings, engines, and landing gear. On completion of work at the last station, the airplane is rolled out of the assembly plant to the flight line for its production flight test, a process that involves a thorough checkout of specified performance.
Many types of small missiles require no such elaborate techniques or facilities. Composed basically of a cylindrical shell, a warhead, a guidance system, and a rocket motor, they are readily assembled in a low-bay plant. Larger missiles of the ballistic type and space launch vehicles are assembled in high-bay facilities with their longitudinal axes vertical. In the case of the space shuttle, for example, the mating of the orbiter with the external tank and solid rocket boosters is conducted with tail down in the 160-metre- (525-foot-) high Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Spacecraft are unique among flight vehicles in that their final assembly generally takes place under clean-room conditions. A typical clean room has an atmosphere-control system that rigidly regulates temperature and humidity and bars entrance, by means of filters, of all but minuscule contamination. Walls and ceilings are typically of one-piece plastic, lacking cracks where dust might collect, and are washed and vacuumed daily. Maintenance of spacecraft or faulty equipment cannot be done within the room without a subsequent thorough environmental “scrubbing.”
Some spacecraft are assembled at successive work stations; others remain in a fixed position while teams of specialists successively install the myriad onboard systems. Because spacecraft have no opportunity for flight testing, an intensely detailed acceptance checkout is handled in the clean room by automatic test equipment. The spacecraft is then encased in a sterile container for shipment.
Verification
Critical for all aerospace vehicles, once they are assembled, are the methods for ensuring the quality of the manufacturing and assembly processes. In the case of aircraft this involves extensive inspections of structural and mechanical items, including functional verification of equipment such as control surfaces and systems, landing-gear operation, avionics performance, weapons-systems interfaces, and personnel (crew and passenger) environmental conditioning. Helicopters, as a special class of aircraft, receive inspections that incorporate verification of rotor drive systems and associated gear trains.
For spacecraft, even greater emphasis is placed on functional verification including, in most cases, assurance of the performance of all critical operations in thermal vacuum chambers that simulate space. In addition, since most of its operations are not modifiable to a significant extent once a spacecraft is in orbit, those that are automatically programmed or controlled by computers require highly detailed validation. This is preferably carried out with accurate simulations, if not actual use, of the communication and command links that will be used during the space mission.
Launch vehicles are verified in somewhat similar fashion. They are tested fully assembled, most often at the launch pad or in a proximate assembly facility where the final elements, including upper-stage rockets and payloads, are installed. The size of most launch vehicles precludes environmental testing at the fully assembled level; rather they are given such testing at the highest possible levels of subassembly. Missiles often follow the spacecraft mode, with emphasis on alignments and testing of sensors and target seekers or other guidance systems being paramount, since they are often adjusted just prior to flight.
Lean manufacturing
Consistent with improving the economics of aerospace vehicles is the transition to a new paradigm for the entire industry, from concept development to operations. This approach involves all processes pertaining to the acquisition, design, development, and manufacturing of a product or system and has been variously called “lean,” “agile,” or “synchronous” manufacturing. It strives to eliminate non-value-added or wasteful resources, including material, space, tooling, and labour. It applies such principles as waste minimization, flexibility, and responsiveness to change; these are supported by efforts to optimize the flow of material and information and to achieve superior quality in order to eliminate scrap and rework.
Lean manufacturing was derived from studies of the automobile industry, which showed that the best Japanese carmakers had achieved competitive advantages by using practices rooted in the principles noted. For the aerospace industry, its implementation involves major cultural changes emphasizing integrated teams of workers having decision-making responsibility at levels closest to where work is performed, in contrast to the conventional system in which responsibility is transferred upward through multiple layers of management. It is estimated that full implementation of this paradigm can reduce costs and product cycle times by 50 percent.
In 1992 the U.S. Air Force funded a study to evaluate the applicability of lean manufacturing to aerospace products. From that effort was established the Lean Aerospace Initiative, a consortium of 20 companies and several government agencies. With federal funding, the participating firms undertook pilot programs, some of which led to the incorporation of commercial lean manufacturing practices in the manufacture of defense products. Although these changes have produced major benefits in local stages of production, their translation to entire product enterprises has been slow. Part of the reason is that a complete enterprise comprises not only design and production but also the overhead functions of administration and support as well as customers and suppliers. Nevertheless, progress was being made with the expansion of lean initiative programs to these elements.