“We’re going farther by improving every area, and we’re doing this by going digital, says Carlos Brana, Dassault’s Senior Vice President, Civil Aircraft. “Every day people come into the aircraft, but they do it digitally.”
Brana updated Falconer on the state of the 6X, which will feature the tallest and widest cabin in business aviation, and the DMU plays a large role in its progress. “Whether you’re talking about design, manufacturing, or support activities, the DMU is central in our processes,” he says.
With designers, suppliers and maintainers all sharing the same reference through the DMU, everything affecting the airplane and all stakeholders throughout the aircraft’s lifecycle can be identified and addressed early in development. In this digitally focused era, what is the relevance of the traditional “iron bird” mockups – a single physical assembly of all critical components? “It’s useful for some parts of the system, but there is no more need for a complete reproduction,” says Brana. “If you wait for this to update your data to support integration, the development phase is not optimized anymore.”
System-specific physical integration benches are still used to debug aircraft systems before their installation in real life aircraft. These are located at Dassault Centers of Excellence in Saint Cloud, near Paris, for flight control systems; in Istres,
near Marseille, for final systems integration; and Little Rock, Arkansas, for cabin interiors related systems.
DMUs were introduced to business aviation with the Falcon 2000 in the mid-90s but for design only. Today, with the current information system capability, and taking into account the entire lifecycle of manufacturing and customer service, the level of optimization possible is unprecedented.
Digital is more intuitive than it was in the past. But expertise developed over careers measured in decades remains the key to developing the enhancements the technology enables, Brana stresses. “We rely heavily on what we call ‘return on experience.’” Tribal knowledge from the 8X, 7X, 2000EX and even previous Falcon campaigns or military projects is eagerly leveraged. “We use every piece of information gathered from the legacy Falcons to design the 6X,” he says.
“When people start a project like this, nothing can replace physical contact,” Brana observed. Thus, the program roll-out began with representatives from all design groups and suppliers coming together face-to-face last year for initial collaborative work. Now, with Preliminary Design Review (PDR) complete, “We have passed to the second phase, where people are still working together with the same tools and same data, but they can work from all over the world on one common digital platform,” Brana says.
F ALCONER ISSUE 49
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