Advanced Manufacturing for Rapid, Affordable-Attritable Airframes

Today’s aerospace industry struggles to rapidly design, experiment, and field novel aerospace and defense capabilities because of the “lock in” business practices of major prime contractors. The rise of computational tools has not shortened design and build timelines over the last 50 years because their use has been offset by a “hard tooling” mindset investing in overly durable and complex tooling for 30-year production runs and 10,000 hour plus airframe life. Nearly all aircraft are expected to have multiple service life extensions due to the enormous non-recurring and recurring cost. Blue Force has developed a digital rapid development workflow to attack this constraint for our commercial aerospace customers. We have already commercialized this offering and have proven the ability to transition from concept to flight test in one year followed by direct transition to low rate production. We have applied this process to the development of capability for the ongoing ADAIR problem – our solution provides 5th generation LO aircraft, representative IRST signature, we use existing commercial technology integrated into a modular airframe and integrate state of the art electronics systems. In this effort we adapt and extend our approach to attritable-class aircraft. The focus is on novel use of materials – often overlooked or long ago ruled out due to anticipated lifetimes – coupled with a minimal tooling approach. The approach directly addresses the need to reconsider manufacturing techniques and materials in the context of the requirements associated with attritable-class aircraft – low cost, high performance, and the ability to manufacture quickly while trading away long lifetime airframes.