Recently I had the opportunity to visit the NBAA (National Business Aviation Association) event and conferences in Atlanta Georgia. This event specializes in products and services for the business jet. Since WorkNC is as well suited for aerospace manufacturing as it is for automotive or mold & die machining, it makes sense to participate in these events.

Part of this trip included a tour of Delta Airline’s Tech Ops, a facility with hundreds of people that service not only Delta planes, but planes from other carriers. This facility provides many aircraft services including:

• Turbine engine maintenance and overhaul
• Avionics maintenance and upgrades
• Creating replacement carbon fiber components
• Landing gear maintenance including brakes
• Painting and applying decals to complete jet airliner exteriors

Since the airline industry runs on a tight schedule, this maintenance facility also runs on a tight schedule. After scoping an engine, maintenance specialists schedule how long it will take to rebuild the engine. This scheduling is important, because several days later, a plane will be scheduled to receive that engine.

One of the things that surprised many on the tour was that the jet engines do not stay with the planes. Often, when a plane is ready to have its engines serviced, it is brought in during the evening, the engine is exchanged with a rebuilt one during the night, and the plane is ready for passenger duty by the morning. The plane does not sit around while waiting for its engines to be serviced.

Upon consideration, this makes perfect sense. Airlines only make money when their jets are actually in service, carrying people to their destinations. Jets sitting on the ground waiting for an engine do not bring in revenue to the airline.

This is analogous to machining and manufacturing. Your CNC machine only makes you money while it is running, cutting parts. An idle machine is only a depreciating asset. So like the airline industry, it makes sense to keep the machines running as much as possible.

Winglet on Boeing 757

Another very interesting thing learned was about Winglets. These are the small vertical or near vertical tip you see often on the ends of airplane wings. I’ve seen them on some planes before, but not on others, and just assumed they were part of the differences in plane designs or versions. It turns out, winglets increase the lift at the tip of the wing by reducing the drag of wingtip vortices. What this means in simple terms is that winglets save Jet Fuel, to the tune of about 2%-3.5% . It has been estimated that winglets have saved over 2.3 Billion gallons of jet fuel to date.

Delta Airlines is slowly adding winglets to most of their fleet. The process of retrofitting a winglet to an existing jet liner takes 4 to 8 days, depending on the type of jet. This is a significant investment for a company that changes jet engines over night to minimize downtime, that a 2% fuel mileage savings is worth that many days of down time. It shows how important something like 2% can be to Delta Airlines.

Which inevitably brings me to CAM software. We know from benchmarking and testing that WorkNC’s roughing algorithms often provide a 20%, and often more, improvement in milling efficiency than many other systems, whilst providing better tool life. Yet, there are so many companies that seem afraid to verify this for themselves. It’s almost like they are willing to trade efficiency and productivity to keep the status quo, or to have only one system or to make IT support easier. In this day and age, you should not, and really can not, turn your head on checking out anything that can improve part of your operation by 20%.