It is a snapshot of an ambitious new Boeing strategy to
unify sprawling design, production and airline services operations under a
single digital ecosystem - in as little as two years.
Critics say Boeing has repeatedly made similar bold pledges
on a digital revolution, with mixed results. But insiders say the overarching
goals of improving quality and safety have taken on greater urgency and
significance as the company tackles multiple threats.
The planemaker is entering 2022 fighting to reassert its
engineering dominance after the 737 MAX crisis, while laying the foundation for
a future aircraft program over the next decade - a $15 billion gamble. It also
aims to prevent future manufacturing problems like the structural flaws that
have waylaid its 787 Dreamliner over the past year.
"It's about strengthening engineering," Boeing's
chief engineer, Greg Hyslop, told Reuters in his first interview in nearly two
years. "We are talking about changing the way we work across the entire
company."
After years of wild market competition, the need to deliver
on bulging order books has opened up a new front in Boeing's war with Europe's
Airbus, this time on the factory floor.
Airbus Chief Executive Guillaume Faury, a former automobile
research boss, has pledged to "invent new production systems and leverage
the power of data" to optimise its industrial system.
Boeing's approach so far has been marked by incremental
advances within specific jet programs or tooling, rather than the systemic
overhaul that characterises Hyslop's push today.
The simultaneous push by both plane giants is emblematic of
a digital revolution happening globally, as automakers like Ford and social
media companies like Facebook parent Meta shift work and play into an immersive
virtual world sometimes called the metaverse.
So how does the metaverse - a shared digital space often
using virtual reality or augmented reality and accessible via the IA Boeing
787-10 Dreamliner taxis past the Final Assembly Building at Boeing South
Carolinanternet - work in aviation?
Like Airbus, Boeing's holy grail for its next new aircraft
is to build and link virtual three-dimensional "digital twin"
replicas of the jet and the production system able to run simulations.
The digital mockups are backed by a "digital
thread" that stitches together every piece of information about the
aircraft from its infancy - from airline requirements, to millions of parts, to
thousands of pages of certification documents - extending deep into the supply
chain.
Overhauling antiquated paper-based practices could bring
powerful change.
More than 70 percent of quality issues at Boeing trace back
to some kind of design issue, Hyslop said. Boeing believes such tools will be
central to bringing a new aircraft from inception to market in as little as
four or five years.
"You will get speed, you will get improved quality,
better communication, and better responsiveness when issues occur," Hyslop
said.
"When the quality from the supply base is better, when
the airplane build goes together more smoothly, when you minimise re-work, the
financial performance will follow from that."
Enormous challenge
Yet the plan faces enormous challenges.
Skeptics point to technical problems on Boeing's 777X
mini-jumbo and T-7A RedHawk military training jet, which were developed using
digital tools.
Boeing has also placed too great an emphasis on shareholder
returns at the expense of engineering dominance, and continues to cut R&D
spending, Teal Group analyst Richard Aboulafia said.
"Is it worth pursuing? By all means," Aboulafia
said. "Will it solve all their problems? No."
Juggernauts like aircraft parts maker Spirit AeroSystems
have already invested in digital technology. Major plane-makers have
partnerships with French software maker Dassault Systèmes. But hundreds of
smaller suppliers spread globally lack the capital or human resources to make
big leaps.
Many have been weakened by the MAX and coronavirus crises,
which followed a decade of price pressure from Boeing or Airbus.
"They not only tell us what hardware we can buy, they
are now going to specify all this fancy digital junk that goes on top of
it?" one supply chain executive said.
'A long game'
Boeing itself has come to realise that digital technology
alone is not a panacea. It must come with organizational and cultural changes
across the company, industry sources say.
Boeing recently tapped veteran engineer Linda Hapgood to
oversee the "digital transformation," which one industry source said
was underpinned by more than 100 engineers.
Hapgood is best known for turning black-and-white paper
drawings of the 767 tanker's wiring bundles into 3-D images, and then
outfitting mechanics with tablets and HoloLens augmented-reality headsets.
Quality improved by 90 percent, one insider said.
In her new role, Hapgood hired engineers who worked on a
digital twin for a now-scrapped mid-market airplane known as NMA.
She is also drawing on lessons learned from the MQ-25 aerial
refuelling drone and the T-7A Red Hawk.
Boeing "built" the first T-7A jets in simulation,
following a model-based design. The T-7A was brought to market in just 36
months.
Even so, the program is grappling with parts shortages,
design delays and additional testing requirements.
Boeing has a running start with its 777X wing factory in
Washington state, where the layout and robot optimisation was first done
digitally. But the broader program is years behind schedule and mired in
certification challenges.
"This is a long game," Hyslop said. "Every
one of these efforts was addressing part of the problem. But now what we want
to do is do it from end to end." © Reuters
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