The warning about the vulnerability of the aerospace and defense industry’s supply chain came buried in the pages of a report issued by the consulting firm EY two years before the COVID-19 outbreak became a full-blown global crisis.
The company’s G150 is aimed at small, high-precision parts made of tough materials.
Like just about every other manufacturing operation, welding has made the leap into the 21st century with automation, agile manufacturing processes, and offline programming.
Before the coronavirus pandemic upended normal life and essentially shut down commercial airliners, the aviation industry had a projected need for 40,000 new aircraft—planes, helicopters, air taxis, and unmanned aerial vehicles—in the next 20 years.
Honeywell Aerospace, part of global commercial and consumer engineering conglomerate Honeywell, produces a large number of the impellers and blisks used in commercial aeroplanes.
In spite of advancing digitalization, manual workstations are still indispensable because automation is not always profitable with small batch quantities or complex processes.
Since 1996, the Plant 15 machining operations at Mercury Marine have included a reliance on automated machining cells. Over the years, the Fond du Lac, Wis.-based manufacturer and distributor of marine engines, parts, accessories and integrated systems has phased out some traditional manufacturing methods in favor of modern cells.
The concept of the digital twin in A&D was born in the 1970s, when NASA began employing full-scale virtual mock-ups of space capsules to forecast the performance of machines in outer space.
It has become far too rare for manufacturers’ visions of an IIoT-fueled utopia to survive contact with reality. A Cisco survey finds that nearly 75 percent of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) projects are failing.
As businesses across the globe are returning to work amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many manufacturers are reconsidering policies and procedures to ensure worker safety and adhere to new regulations in the post-pandemic environment.