Bell is not just developing new aircraft, it is changing how they are made.
The company cut the ribbon on its Manufacturing Technology Center (MTC) in Fort Worth, Texas, Thursday afternoon, ahead of a formal grand opening later this year. The MTC is located in a 140,000-sq-ft building 15 minutes away from Bell’s main campus and was established to lower lead time, cost, and variability from components for Bell’s future vertical lift (FVL) aircraft, including the V-280 Valor and 360 Invictus.
The MTC “is the way we are reinventing our manufacturing process at Bell for all of our next-generation products,” said Glenn Isbell, Bell v-p of rapid prototyping and manufacturing innovation. It offers a digitally connected space for collaboration between Bell teams in an environment that promotes smart risk-taking, he said. New systems will be tested and vetted for production suitability before being introduced to Bell’s future factories.
Bell will use the MTC to “showcase how we will deliver the most affordable, capable, and reliable aircraft for the warfighter,” said Bell CEO and president Mitch Snyder.
Since starting operations, the facility already has born fruit toward significantly cutting lead times and costs of critical V-280 components, said Isbell, noting that the lead time for the aircraft’s rotor masts was shrunk from 18 months to 90 days and costs were reduced by 40 percent. “In the vertical lift space, the manufacturing process hasn’t changed that much in the last 30 years,” he said. “We developed a significant amount of manufacturing technology when we developed the V-22 [tiltrotor] 30 to 40 years ago but the industry hasn’t had a different shift in how aircraft are made.
“Our core philosophy is to simplify the manufacturing process by eliminating as many steps as we can, improve what is left, and use digital control capability to monitor how the parts are being built,” Isbell said. Besides cutting lead times and costs, digital controls eliminate variability and the possibility of an entire bad batch of parts being manufactured, he added. “Variation has caused struggles for low-volume aircraft production for a long time. This is a dedicated space to do step-function advances in manufacturing. We will be able to build things in such a different way. Most of the projects we are taking on have some pretty aggressive targets.”
Isbell said the MTC will develop manufacturing processes for both Bell factories and those of its suppliers, but added that Bell plans to keep the manufacture of critical components in-house to assure quality control. “We still plan to build most of our own core components—gearboxes, blades, those kinds of things. We believe having a vertically integrated approach controls the quality. We are not planning to deviate from that."
The MTC will be home to design and manufacturing engineers, programmers, materials specialists, and others, recruited from both inside and outside of Bell. Equipment will include digitally connected heat treating, additive-manufactured tooling, advanced composites manufacturing, bonding, high-speed machining, and robotics with an emphasis on critical vehicle components such as gears, gearboxes, main rotor blades, yokes, wings, and assembly-intensive components. “Giving people a space like this and the funding we have been able to give them for the last three to four years—to develop and try different things—we’ve been able to develop this capability offline while we have been flying the V-280,” Isbell said.
Besides serving as a manufacturing laboratory, the MTC is also a demonstration center aimed at dissuading uninformed skeptics wary of industry claims of better, faster, cheaper. “Disbelief is sort of the natural tendency when we say we can cut lead times by 80 percent or cost by 40 percent,” said Isbell. “Part of the reason we developed this center is that we can show it and prove it. We want to be able to walk people through and show them how we are doing it.”
Isbell admits the task is ambitious. “This facility is the proving-ground where 80 to 100 of the best minds I know are able to go and create and let it fail, try it again and succeed, and then go to the next step and go forward. We’ve been able to have great success, but for every one of those, there are three to four things that I’m not talking about. We don’t bat a thousand and, if we do, it means we are picking the wrong things. It’s a fun project, but a challenging project.”
Bell is not just developing new aircraft, it is changing how they are made.
The company cut the ribbon on its Manufacturing Technology Center (MTC) in Fort Worth, Texas, in March, ahead of a formal grand opening later this year. The MTC is located in a 140,000-sq-ft building 15 minutes away from Bell’s main campus and was established to lower lead time, cost, and variability from components for Bell’s future vertical lift (FVL) aircraft, including the V-280 Valor and 360 Invictus.
The MTC “is the way we are reinventing our manufacturing process at Bell for all of our next-generation products,” said Glenn Isbell, Bell v-p of rapid prototyping and manufacturing innovation. It offers a digitally connected space for collaboration between Bell teams in an environment that promotes smart risk-taking, he said. New systems will be tested and vetted for production suitability before being introduced to Bell’s future factories.
Bell will use the MTC to “showcase how we will deliver the most affordable, capable, and reliable aircraft for the warfighter,” said Bell CEO and president Mitch Snyder.
Since starting operations, the facility already has born fruit toward significantly cutting lead times and costs of critical V-280 components, said Isbell, noting that the lead time for the aircraft’s rotor masts was shrunk from 18 months to 90 days and costs were reduced by 40 percent. “In the vertical lift space, the manufacturing process hasn’t changed that much in the last 30 years,” he said. “We developed a significant amount of manufacturing technology when we developed the V-22 [tiltrotor] 30 to 40 years ago but the industry hasn’t had a different shift in how aircraft are made.”
Besides cutting lead times and costs, digital controls eliminate variability and the possibility of an entire bad batch of parts being manufactured, he added. “Variation has caused struggles for low-volume aircraft production for a long time. This is a dedicated space to do step-function advances in manufacturing. We will be able to build things in such a different way.”
Isbell said the MTC will develop manufacturing processes for both Bell factories and those of its suppliers, but added that Bell plans to keep the manufacture of critical components in-house to assure quality control.
The MTC will be home to design and manufacturing engineers, programmers, materials specialists, and others, recruited from both inside and outside of Bell. Equipment will include digitally connected heat treating, additive-manufactured tooling, advanced composites manufacturing, bonding, high-speed machining, and robotics with an emphasis on critical vehicle components such as gears, gearboxes, main rotor blades, yokes, wings, and assembly-intensive components.
Besides serving as a manufacturing laboratory, the MTC is also a demonstration center aimed at dissuading uninformed skeptics wary of industry claims of better, faster, cheaper. “Disbelief is sort of the natural tendency when we say we can cut lead times by 80 percent or cost by 40 percent,” said Isbell. “Part of the reason we developed this center is that we can show it and prove it.”