- Carbon Continues to Make Gains as Best-in-Class
Aerostructure Composite Material
The 50,000-square-foot facility will accommodate increasing volumes of assembly work on
aerostructure components for commercial airliners.
Klune focuses on casting, forming, machining and assembly of
aerostructure parts and offers a range of cold-formed sheet metal components.
Strata has formed industrial partnerships with leading aerospace companies EADS, Airbus, FACC and Alenia Aeronautica (a Finmeccanica company) through which composite
aerostructure manufacturing programs will be established in the new plant.
Mrs Osborne believes the transfer of specialist work from England will still go ahead, but that the company will now try to sell off the huge
aerostructure plant.
Officials at Goodrich said it will realign its
aerostructure operations to support Goodrich's current business strategy.
This first success stems from consultations between the two groups and augurs well for further contracts from other on-going calls for tenders, notably concerning various parts of the
aerostructure, on-board equipment and cabling of the A380 and certain business aircraft.
It is also the first step towards expanding Strata's capabilities beyond
aerostructures composite manufacturing by forging new relationships with other
aerostructure manufacturers from around the globe, it added.
In the first phase of the project Heroux-Devtek will invest up to CAD20m over the next three years to build a 47,200 square foot facility equipped with state-of-the-art machinery for producing
aerostructure components.
Strata, the composites
aerostructures company wholly owned by UAE-based Mubadala Development, recently completed its first fully constructed in-house
aerostructure in less than six months of plant opening.
Graham Chisnall, director of strategy and engineering at GKN Aerospace Services, said the company anticipated consolidation in the fragmented
aerostructures market in the US and Europe over the next five to eight years, which would create as few as four big suppliers of
aerostructure components.