I totally agree with the comments made on the advantages and challenges of AM for aerospace production. I am very curious to see how much AM may be used for the upcoming 6th generation fighters planned by the Air Force to replace the F-22 and the Navy to replace the F-18. Those programs are probably, eh, 10-15 years away from production (who knows, maybe more), and I have no doubt that AM will be used in some ways. But my guess is probably more like special nozzles or connectors, rather than entire bulkheads or wing boxes.
Which means that the next opportunity to have AM be a substantial part of the real guts of an American-made fighter aircraft would be a 7th generation, which would probably be in the 2040-2050 timeframe.
Man, you miss one bus, it takes a long time for the next one to come along.
So far as I know, “touch labor” and “direct labor” are interchangeable terms to refer to manual work, like assembly. Generally speaking, the amount of touch labor can be reduced by manufacturing strategies that involve increasing automation, simplifying design (so fewer things need to be put together), improving flow (so it takes less time to put tab A in slot B), eliminating rework, and so on.
Actually it does not matter HOW MANY planes we can build!
Just 1 plane and 1 smart bomb can do today what it might have taken hundreds of planes in WWII to accomplish!
That is hundreds of planes could have been sent to a target in say Germany, but not a one of them hit what they were aiming for! These days just one plane and one smart bomb can get the job done. That one bomb may cost a million dollars, but well worth the cost in the scheme of things. It actually may be less expensive - certainly less so far as the cost in lives.
I wonder if aerospace manufacturers could gather up the ‘wasted’ parts of titanium or whatnot and reuse it. If they have to shave 90% off of a block/ingot of titanium to have a 10% aircraft component, could they gather and reuse the shaved-off 90%?
It doesn’t go to the landfill, if that’s what you’re wondering. But a manufacturing plant can’t make direct use of a pile of metal chips; they get sent back to the metal supplier, who melts them down (and does whatever else is necessary) to make new solid blocks of billet metal that can then be used by the manufacturing plant.
Thanks for the info. How hard would it be for a manufacturer like Boeing (which must go through enormous quantities of titanium every year) to have an on-site smelter at Everett where they could feed the titanium shavings/chips into and melt them back into block ingots again?
My understanding is the shavings cannot be reprocessed into aerospace quality titanium, either locally or at a metals specialist. The finished remelt product won’t meet the mine-to-finished-part paper trail requirements for aerospace.
But it can certainly be made into titanium stock used other stuff like automotive, marine, or maybe bio-medical uses. Which remade stock sells for a fraction of what aerospace quality virgin stock costs. So the percent of cost recovery is much smaller than the percent of raw material recovery.
The heavy machining work is done by subcontractors, who supply Boeing with the finished part. Even then, those subcontractors will sell their machining swarf to a recycler who specializes in that sort of stuff.
Re: the OP question -
Today’s fighters are incredibly complex. You’re packing miles of wire and dozens of “black boxes” (LRUs - Line Replaceable Units) for the avionics, a couple thousand feet of tubing of various sizes for fuel, hydraulics, pneumatics, lubrication, life support, etc., multiple fuel cells of various sizes and shapes, one or two of the most technologically-advanced turbine engines available, and an ejection seat (or two) with several rocket motors and explosive charges… all into an airframe whose shape and structure was optimized for strength, not accessibility. If you’re talking 5th-gen fighter (F-22, F-35), you’ve also dealing with the low observability (LO) aspects of the structure, which complicates installation.
Then… ALL those systems need to be tested and ops-checked, to ensure everything works as it’s supposed to.