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36th Roy Chadwick Lecture — Manufacturing Breakout 1941-1991. Development in aerospace industry manufacturing techniques

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2016

P. H. Summerfield
P. H. Summerfield*
Affiliation:
British Aerospace, Woodford
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Extract

Fifty years ago, the A.V. Roe Team took the Lancaster four engined bomber (Fig. 1) from concept to first flight in a period of about nine months. Under the driving pressures of War and with an outstanding approach to the challenges of the project, a number of key concepts emerged, which are still considered modern and innovative today:

  1. Teamworking and leadership

  2. Design for ease of production

  3. Simultaneous engineering

  4. Materials and parts supply logistics

This approach considered the aircraft engineering process as a whole and kept the ultimate aims of the project uppermost.

The project achieved remarkable manufacturing performance targets; assembly of 49 aircraft per week at peak production, combined with a three and a half day assembly lead time.

After the War, the need to manufacture aircraft in large volumes decreased and at the same time rapid technical advancements dramatically increased aircraft complexity. The nature of the industry changed and the balanced application of design engineering and manufacturing logistics that had made Lancaster manufacture so successful, became of secondary importance. During the 1970s and 1980s improvements in manufacturing within the aerospace industry were fragmented and now, at the beginning of 1990s, when the UK aerospace industry is compared with other sophisticated, high-technology industries, most business performance indicators are firmly at the bottom of the league (Fig. 2).

Type
Research Article
Information
The Aeronautical Journal , Volume 96 , Issue 952 , February 1992 , pp. 35 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Aeronautical Society 1992 

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