Three questions to the director of AIA, Bordeaux |
| Helen Chachaty |
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28 APR 2017 | 948 words
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The Atelier industriel de l'aéronautique (AIA) in Bordeaux is celebrating its 80th birthday this year. The AIA, which employs around a thousand people and has turnover of 250 million Euro per year, is responsible for maintaining a wide range of military engines, from Larzacs on Alphajets to TP400s on A400Ms, via M88s on Rafales or T56s Hawkeyes. "Most of our activities are centred on the M53, the Larzac and the M88", explains the AIA, Bordeaux's chief executive, the general armaments engineer Franck Leclercq, who adds: "We had quite wide variety [with the maintenance of Lynx, Tigre, C-130 or A400M engines, ed.], which enables us to have skills in all fields and to maintain capacities on older fleets".
What's so special about AIA, Bordeaux when it comes to engine maintenance?
We're not all that well-known and we work mostly in the Defence sector: we are attached to the Ministry of Defence and we are an industrial establishment, with activities organised and carried out under the same conditions as a private industrial company.
In relation to our main customer, SIMMAD, we have internal contracts which seek to have the best strategy in terms of equipment availability, costs and performance. Our core business is repairs; this is a key element, our raison d'être, because its a vector for savings. For a part which may sometimes cost up to EUR100 000 for each individual part, a repair may save up to 90% of the costs. We are developing this skill on our product chains and we will be proposing it to our industrial partner in a contractual framework.
What are the stakes currently facing AIA and how are you coping with them?
We are seeing growth in aviation activity, with theatres of operation which are particularly demanding in terms of attacks on machines; this means that there are very high stakes surround MOC on this equipment, particularly cost control.
We have carried out a certain number of discussions on this topic, with two main directions. On recent generation engines, with very sophisticated parts with very high production costs, there is tension on the ability to produce new parts. Reducing part consumption in support is an essential axis for improving the current situation. There may be high demand depending on the period. This is an axis where we are in discussions, in particular with Safran, when we have trouble getting certain parts. When we have a two-year cycle to produce them, it's hard to be able to meet demand quickly.
One other important element is anticipating and planning requirements. These requirements may change from one year to the next. This means that we need to be ready to produce the availability that the armed forces expect of us, on equipment which may have long cycles. We can recruit and train operators to cope with a huge increase in production, but it takes two to three years to train an operator. The aim is to anticipate and forecast requirements better. We are working closely with support actors, whether the SIMMAD, squadrons or industrial companies. We have set up an integrated working unit, where each actor is a stake-holder and they work together on a daily basis to facilitate logistical management and requirement forecasting. The idea is to strengthen this platform-based structure, to smooth exchanges between actors and share a concerted vision.
What is the role of innovation at AIA?
Innovation is part of our DNA. We support it in-house, at every level, so that ideas can emerge, be supported, valued and applied. We have an upstream design manager office, which seeks to apply emerging technologies in our business. For example, we are carrying out work on additive manufacturing, which has a whole host of applications, in particular in part repair, but this is a highly demanding process.
In conjunction with the DGA, we are carrying out tests to repair a single-piece rotor blade disk for the M88, a part which costs over EUR100 000. At the moment, if it receives a slight impact the entire part needs to be discarded, but we are studying solutions to repair this small impact using laser wire additive technology, to cover the impact with material. We have been working on it for seven years and have every hope that we will manage to qualify this repair, to free up a certain number of parts and make maintenance easier.
We also have a "fab lab", with resources such as 3D printers, in plastic applications, which enable us to prototype the parts we have to manufacture, especially tooling. This enables us to familiarise ourselves with the tools, to see their potential and to take part up upstream study networks where we exchange technology with other industrial companies and remain ready to roll out concrete applications of these technologies to our requirements.
One final axis is work on artificial intelligence, combined with imaging, to make it easier to identify faults on parts. The idea is to be able to spot a crack on a turbine blade, for example. With these technological developments, the operator's actions will be backed up by systems. We already have a prototype for this type of system: a camera which films a part, analyses the image and compares it to a database to see whether what it is seeing meets an acceptable or unacceptable fault criterion.
We also have innovative actions relating to the toxicity of the products we use in our work, where our objective is to evaluate and qualify substitutes for products and processes which are harmful to the environment and our operators, while maintaining our performance levels.
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