How Cirrus Builds Airplanes

everyone is August 17 2017 I am in Duluth Minnesota where I am reliably told that the ice is finally off the lakes and it's safe to go outside without a parka but hey why take chances so I'm going to stay right here in the Cirrus Factory and we're gonna do a deep dive into how cirrus builds airplanes here in Duluth if you don't know this about airplane manufacturing you should compared to cars they have fewer parts but low volume complicates the process so airplanes require a lot more hand production work than cars do like any airplane factory that hopes to be profitable Cirrus is constantly looking for efficiency here's the company head of manufacturing Rick Hollander so the factory is set up in such a way that the initial composite parts come in from Grand Forks on a weekly basis to satisfy the weekly demand from there they go into a climate-controlled storage area in our bond shop which then we produce one airplane per tact I'm currently attack times about five hours 35 hours their planes moving through a bonding station until it then goes into a body shop where we do bodywork and prep then we'll wheel out both the fuselage in the wing in a complete state to be assembled in our mid assembly area that you can see right behind me and from the mid assembly area that will then go to a paint and our new finishing center from the finishing center that will you know then come back with a almost customer ready paint quality to go through our final assembly at that point we send it back over to flight tests it gets about three to five hours of flight tests that we do a final paint final detail and then it's ready for the customer so one of the biggest challenges we have right now with small volume is trying to find efficiencies in our system typically what we'll do is every two years we do a wall-to-wall time study on all the processes which then allows us a couple things one we're going to where the works being done so we can see what's actually happening to we're evaluating every employee new or season two see how well they can react in that environment which then gives us the opportunity to line balanced and the line balancing is really where we're finding a lot of the efficiencies that we can take out of the system as well as create an equal work an equal line flow for all employees which then also takes stress off the employees to allow for better quality as we go down the line on the SR line it is it's minute it's 30 minutes is definitely worthwhile if you think about 30 minutes times 350 airplanes that's a lot of time so 30 minutes on the STR line is something that will go attack pretty aggressively on the jet line we're really in the the two-hour bucket type timeframe at this point as we try to stabilize once it's stable and we've taken the variation out of the line then we'll start looking at the one hour and the 30 minutes and really starting to attack but today we're making one jet a week 50 a year two hours is a pretty good nugget once we go to two a week we're gonna want to be a lot more aggressive so we absolutely reach a plateau and and if you think about the learning curve which is which is actually proven out which was first founded in aerospace industry you you essentially remove efficiency at a certain level call it fifteen percent 20 percent every time you double production so in theory we've made six thousand SRS so if you use 15% efficiencies we won't reach another 15% efficiency level until we make our twelve thousand so it's really hard we really do hit the plateaus but there's always room for improvement and a lot of it comes right from the operators telling us Rick we ought to be doing this a little bit differently and and we go and do what they tell us to do differently that's our job when we visited Cirrus the company was in the middle of reorganizing the entire production line to accommodate higher volume of the Cirrus vision jet all without adding so much as a foot of extra floor space it was Rakhal endure again so if we go back five years ago we were making about 275 SR a year fast-forward to today we're making 100 more SRS so 350 this year and our plans are to ramp to about 100 Jets a year we didn't add any floor space to do that so effectively five years ago this all I call it s our land and what we've been able to do through time we talked about the time studies and how do we better flow the product we've been able to utilize the exact same floor space to effectively get 450 aircraft out the door through time we've been able to morph into kind of a mixed line of optimizing different areas we're optimizing for a rate of 100 and we're optimizing for rate of 350 our sub assemblies are optimized at a kind of a quasi batch process to where they're building seven or eight at a time and they deliver seven or eight and then they go on to the next process you know if you grew up in the 1960s you probably remember putting together Revell models you remember breaking off the parts from that little rack gluing the halves together with the glue you weren't supposed to snip well it sort of works like that here but on a much larger scale so let's take a look at how Cirrus put all the parts together and bakes them in this big oven behind me what you see here right now is the closing of a fuselage so they're bonding the two halves together using an adhesive after that it'll go through a cure process for the adhesive to cure so all the parts are manufactured in Grand Forks at our other facility and they're trucked over here the first process for us would be to run it through a grit blast process to abrade the surface to get it ready for bonding and then they're pretty much ready for to be put in the jigs and fixtures after it comes out of the bonding fixture it'll go through a trim and drill process where they'll trim out for Windows add other holes for it get it ready for the next processes down the line currently on the SR side of it right now we're at seven a week and we're going to be ramping to eight a week on the SF side right now our attack time is one a week in any kind of factories building a lot of anything tooling is an essential part of the process well this is tooling Cirrus has a lot of it and it's a big investment Automation in the four robotic CNC machinery is common in most factories and there's a little bit of that going on here too here's Rob Neitzel to explain so what you're looking at here is our trimming drill robot it's a seven axis robot used to trim large parts and assemblies so along with it there's a large fixture that holds our wing in the right spot so that the robot knows where to find it and can accurately locate that trimmed features and then the drilled holes robotics the key drivers in our decision to go this route were reducing the cost of tooling and providing more flexibility in our designs so if if we decide we want to move a hole over just a little bit we can reprogram the robot versus retooling a hard steel fixture while robotics clearly have a place of building airplanes the real heavy lifting that Cirrus is done by human hands a lot of hands and that happens in this part of the factory what serious calls mid assembly here's Jamie shilling so after the aircraft comes out of the composite areas in the body shop it comes out to what we call here mid assembly at Cirrus so what we do in medicine Lee is we have stations that we put a lot of the most of the components for the aircraft are put in in this stage so all the wire harnesses that go throughout the the interior of the cabin and the aft portion of the cabin as well as sub assemblies like the cones will get installed in our mid assembly area so in the SR mate assembly we do the same sorts of things we put in a console we put in a lot of sub parts before the aircraft get painted the difference is we have a much shorter window to do that so we move the plane every six hours right now in our in our s our line where as we're doing it every four days in in the SF line so right right now our TAC time for for an SR is seven SRS per week so it breaks it down to every five and a half hours we're building a station and moving the plane to the next station with the technicians moving moving the plane and then staying in that station and getting the next Dix plane there I'm on the SF side that that tack time is a week long looking to reduce that over time so as you watch the SR production line you'll see the technicians installing all their components and then five hours later it'll be moved to the next station in the production line so you'll see a lot more a lot more items put on the airplane as airplane moves down the production line the mid assembly for the SR has six stations involved in that so it's it stays in there roughly one week so after the mid Assembly stationed on the SR side we send it over to our paint facility and it's it begins looking pretty with our top coats on the jet side we send it to our final assembly line where we start with wing hang and putting the stabilizers on Rick Hollander told me that the single most difficult part of building these airplanes is the paint job it's not that the pain is hard to apply but figuring out when perfect is getting in the way of good enough if customers notice anything in their new airplanes it's likely to be paint cottages here's how Sierra's avoids that so overall the process for finishing a jet or piston kinda is divided into two segments there's what we call the paint segment and the detail segment on the on the paint side we get it ready for paint and paint applied to it some basics assembly and then it goes over to our final and flight line in the main production building after flight tests it'll come back over here for final detail any spot spray for damage or pain issues will be done as well as Santa and buff and final finished sealants stripes and getting an overall customer ready the jet we painted over a weekend right now we'll be looking to expand that two-week day shift as rate increases then it's ready to go back to the other side after some sand and buff and any inspections that are needed for it and here a little detour before we finish up Sears has orders for some 600 vision jets and that production had to be incorporated into a factory that hasn't been enlarged other than a new paint facilitator Sears hopes to ramp up jet production to more than 100 airplanes a year here's how they're gonna do it so right behind me is our final assembly line at Sears aircraft for the sf50 vision jet this is the area where all the structural assemblies and the sub assemblies bit assemblies come together and the piece parts are now ready to be assembled the first station we have puts all of the components together so this is the first time that the vision jet is together one piece our stabilizers and our wing come together in this station then we move on to our next station where we rigged the aircraft so all of the control surfaces go on and go through their final rigging after that's done we move forward to our fairings and assembly area where the aircraft is packaged up so everything's done now on the aircraft essentially and we're up to maintenance so all of the fairings for the wing our cap system can go on and we're gonna be ready for paint as soon as it leaves that station which is the next place that it goes so right now we're in the middle of a move we're growing with both the vision jet and the sr line and we need to optimize our space and optimize our float so we've learned a lot more about our vision jet and what it likes to go together and what it doesn't and tomorrow actually within 12 hours we're gonna move this entire area and our s our area and reorganize it with the move we're gonna improve on our our rate so our rate is moving from half a unit to one unit and we're gonna continue to grow on and go from there so we need to improve our flow so this will optimize both the flow of the SR and the SF we have commonality between the two groups so now that the sf50 is mature or more mature we're able to start capturing and improve the flow and reduce some waste time that we have in movement by the time this line is reorganized and tuned to maximum efficiency seer says it will be capable of producing about 125 Jets a year or just over two a week like any other Factory Cirrus will let it mature for a while and then a couple of years later they'll reevaluate it incorporate what they've learned and start all over again that's because as Rick Hollander pointed out successful manufacturing is a constant process of reinvention we'll come back and take a look at it then meanwhile thanks to Sears for giving us access to the factory into the long-suffering Matt Bird wall who's standing behind the camera they're following us around and making sure we get everything we need without getting in trouble thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: AVweb

Views: 243,498

Rating: 4.8958731 out of 5

Keywords: Avweb, Cirrus Aircraft, Paul Bertorelli, SR22, SF50, Cirrus jet, Duluth

Id: -PdTNmPoY94

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Arctic_Scrap]

They build them by paying shit wages to people who have no business being a part of building an aircraft.