Boeing 787 Dreamliner - Mark Wagner [45]
Here stringers longer than seventy-two feet were fabricated and co-cured with skins made in the same facility that also had responsibility for the final assembly of the complete wingbox. Mitsubishi’s Shimon Oseki site made all remaining wing stringers, while the company’s Hiroshima plant contributed parts for the autoclave. Shinmaywa, better known for its flying boats, was subcontracted to produce composite spars.
The 154,200-square-foot composite fabrication factory was completed in mid-April 2006, and incorporated a 26-by-131-foot autoclave to cure the 787’s long wing-box. Also including NDI, waterjet, and automated layup machines, the site was used to complete a successful fuel and seal test on a representative wingbox section in April of that year. Earlier tests, running back over two years, included tension/shear evaluations conducted in Mitsubishi’s Nagasaki site, and main landing-gear fitting strength tests at the company’s Kobe plant. To accommodate the higher loads, skins around the landing gear area were thickened to about 1.5 inches, compared to about 0.5 inch for most of the remaining wing.
A few yards away, down by the brown waters of the Nagoya Harbor complex, Mitsubishi’s wharfside composite assembly factory was completed by the end of August 2006. From here completed ship-sets were loaded directly onto barges at the dock and transported downriver to the nearby Centrair airport at Nagoya for shipment by 747 Large Cargo Freighter (LCF)—or Dreamlifter—to Everett. The site was sized to house up to ten assembly bays as well as four predelivery bays and a split-level area housing a moving production line on the upper floor for systems installation. Each wing consisted of main composite spars, skins, and up to eighteen composite stringers. The structure also included thirty-seven aluminum ribs, the largest of which were fitted to the wing center box.
The enormous traveling Mitsubishi mandrel for the lower skin of the right wing glides smoothly along, rolling so silently that it plays tunes as it goes to warn of its approach. The invar mandrel, weighing around 40 tons, was designed to be 102 feet long to accommodate the 787 wing and deposit the uncured skin directly in the 131-foot-long autoclave. Once cured, solid laminate wing skins were cut to shape using a powerful waterjet cutter built in the United States by Washington-based Flow International at its facility in Jeffersonville, Indiana. Waterjets were used because of their ability to cut thick laminates quickly without overheating the material. Mark Wagner
The upper center fuselage Section 44, undergoes assembly in Alenia’s Grottaglie site. Together with the Section 46 made alongside in the same facility, the 28-foot-long section would later be joined to the Kawasaki-made main landing gear wheel well and the Fuji-made center wing box at Global Aeronautica’s Charleston facility. Mark Wagner
ITALIAN JOB
A similar mammoth effort was meanwhile under way in southern Italy, where Alenia Aeronautica was gearing up to make large sections of the fuselage at its Grottaglie site, near Taranto. Here the company was to produce the center-aft fuselage Section 46 and mid-Section 44, which together made up about 60 percent of the fuselage. Section 44, the midfuselage section over the wings, measured 28 feet long, while the adjacent Section 46, farther aft, measured 33 feet long for the 787-8 family. The facility was sized to handle future stretches including the 787-9 and the later 787-10.
By mid-2006 Alenia was completing assembly of a massive main manufacturing building measuring 1,310 by 570 feet and about 79 feet tall. Covering 230,000 square feet, the stylish building included a 56-by-118 foot automated fiber placement machine made by Rockford, Illinois–based Ingersoll Machine Tools, and a 28-by-64-foot autoclave described by the company as the largest in Europe. The cavernous site was completed later in the year as it prepared to begin work on a preproduction fuselage before starting assembly of the first production unit