Inside the aerospace factory of the future

In less than a century — less time than this journal has been publishing — it’s gone from basic mechanical engineering closer to bicycle building than anything else, combined with classical woodworking skills and fabric work; to working and joining first steel and then aluminium plate; and now to using man-made composite materials; while engines have progressed from simple piston-based internal combustion models through several generations of jet, flirting relatively briefly with rocketry, culminating in today’s turbojets, with the whole system controlled by mechanical linkages pulled by wires, to electrical signals transmitted along wires, and now advanced electronics with digital signals sometimes sent without any wires at all.

But we’re now on the cusp of a manufacturing revolution which may affect aerospace considerably. The advent of new manufacturing techniques, advanced metallic and ceramic materials, and the increasing use of composites will mean that the aircraft factories of the coming decades will be very different from the ones we see today: and that’ll affect not only the way the aircraft they produce look and operate, but also the type of skills that people who work there will need. ‘