Posted by: Amiee Category: ASCE2,NWAA news Date: Monday, February 13, 2012

North West Aerospace Alliance invited members of it’s supply chain to share an opportunity to gain early understanding of the future shifts facing supply chain capabilities last Thursday at the prestigious Concorde Conference Centre, Manchester.

Over the decades, aircraft design and manufacturing technologies have been severely challenged to meet the ever increasing demand for increased aircraft performance, capability and sustainability.

Since the inspirational Spitfire aircraft programme, the world has seen aircraft design and manufacturing technologies achieve staggering improvements with such aircraft programmes as; Canberra, Lightning, Jaguar, Harrier, Boeing 747,Tornado, Airbus A320, Typhoon and more recent programmes of F35, Airbus A380 and Boeing 787. A new breed of aircraft known as UAV’s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are now breaking through and pushing the current boundaries of design and manufacturing technologies to even higher levels through the Mantis and Taranis projects.

To meet the next generation of Design and Manufacturing Technologies, BAE Systems have launched a project entitled SIMPLISTIC (SIMPLIfied, Sustainable Technologies for Integrated AirCraft).

This project highlighted its objectives to meet affordability via ECO-design and manufacturing, sustainability and uniqueness. It will expand on challenges to achieve such demands for 25% to 50% improvement to current performance, compliance and sustainability.

Under the wings of the G-BOAC Concorde, Steve Johnston of BAE Systems illustrated via demonstrator concept models how these objectives and challenges can be achieved, and how they will impact on our current supply chain design and manufacturing technologies.

This exclusive event gave the opportunity for companies to engage with this project in readiness to be able to support future design and manufacturing Capabilities.  With an insight into current projects and capabilities from UCLan, University of Bolton, Virtual Engineering Centre, Lancaster University, University of Salford, Manchester University and Liverpool University, this was an event which brought together manufacturers and academia and enabled future research and development projects to be discussed.

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