Steve Trimble A newly opened factory on the Skunk Works complex heralds a new era and a return to series manufacturing by Lockheed Martin's 78-year-old advanced development programs business unit. Aviation Week Defense Editor Steve Trimble attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony on Aug. 10. Read and listen in to what he saw and what it means for the next wave of military aircraft production.
Steve Trimble
Credit: Lockheed Martin
To a soundtrack of “Levitating” by English pop singer Dua Lipa, about 100 suit-clad dignitaries filed into Building 658 on the Skunk Works campus on Aug. 10, expecting to attend an exclusive ribbon-cutting event for Lockheed Martin’s latest and most advanced aerospace factory, yet entering a lobby to find a disorienting scene for almost any American defense industry veteran.
The brand new, 217,000-ft.2 facility is dedicated to building the next generation of classified combat aircraft and missile projects using a newly embraced, digital approach to industrial management, but workers and guests enter through a high-ceiling, well-lit lobby that evokes I.M. Pei’s angular modernism rather than a functionalist factory design.
On the left side of the lobby, a cafeteria for the machinists and engineers presented a layout similar to a high-end hotel breakfast bar. A bank of work stations equipped with power outlets and ethernet ports lined the far wall, offering workers a place to check messages on their smartphones and tablets before returning to their classified workspace. Strips of black lacquer offered highlights to the bright-white walls and ceilings leading from the lobby into the cavernous assembly hall.
“We’ve come a long way since a circus tent in World War II,” said Jeff Babione, Lockheed’s vice president of the Skunk Works division, referring to the impromptu facility hastily erected in Burbank, California, in 1943 to house a team of engineers and machinists that designed, built and delivered the XP-80 jet fighter in 143 days.
The guests attending the ribbon-cutting within the factory could not bring cameras or smartphones inside the assembly hall. Journalists were advised not to sketch drawings of the interior.
“For many of you, this may be the last time you’re in this facility,” Babione said.
As soon as the guests departed, the first new building on this campus since the arrival of the Skunk Works in 1989—following its move from Burbank—was to become operational, locked to guests lacking compartmentalized security clearances to allow production work to begin.
The Skunk Works made no rule against painting a picture of the assembly hangar’s interior from memory in prose. For the benefit of posterity, the interior of the classified facility is an assembly hall divided by in half by a row of nine load-bearing I-beams spaced roughly 40 ft. apart. Each bay measures 440 ft. long and 145 ft. wide. Each bay is wide enough to contain a Boeing 737, Northrop Grumman RQ-4 or Lockheed U-2S. The hall appears tall enough to contain an aircraft twice the height of a 737, but still far short of a Lockheed C-5M.
Building 648 is one of four factories opened within the Lockheed enterprise this year to exploit a new approach to manufacturing referred to variously as “digital production” and “Industry 4.0.” The philosophy seeks to transfer the fully reconfigurable quality of a microelectronics or pharmaceutical assembly hall to the scale of large military aircraft production. As such, the assembly hall is divided into two bays, and each bay can be further broken into roughly 145-ft.-square cells. Thus, Lockheed can reconfigure the facility to house six separate walled-off projects. Alternatively, three projects can be produced in one bay, while the other is filled by a single assembly line. Or the company can commit all 217,000 ft.2 of assembly space to a single project.
In some ways, the layout is not unlike that of Building 601, the even larger, cavernous hangar that the Skunk Works inherited from the L-1011 airliner program when the advanced projects organization moved to Palmdale more than 30 years ago. The interior of Building 601 is a windowless warren of subdivided bays, cells and nooks containing a multitude of mostly classified and proprietary projects.
The key difference is that Building 648 will enable a historic revival of series manufacturing at Skunk Works. Between the mid-1950s and 1980s, the Skunk Works staff in Burbank often produced their own breakthrough aircraft designs, including the U-2, SR-71 and F-117. Since the 1990s, however, the division has focused mainly on building prototypes of aircraft, such as the X-35 for the Joint Strike Fighter program or the AGM-158 for the Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile. But then the Skunk Works handed off series production to Lockheed’s manufacturing divisions, with certain exceptions, such as the RQ-170 unmanned aircraft system (UAS).
As the U.S. military looks to acquire a new generation of low-cost flight vehicles in relatively short production batches to perform specialized roles, the Skunk Works senses a new opportunity to build their own aircraft again.
“In true Skunk Works fashion, we’re doing it differently,” Babione said. “Think about an intelligent, flexible factory, where I haven’t decided exactly what’s going to go in. [It] allows me to build things like fighters or things like [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] platforms or things like maybe hypersonic weapons —all on that same area.”
That means not only the facility is reconfigurable, but also the fixtures and automated processes. In Fort Worth, Lockheed uses an elaborate, laser-guided tooling rig to align each major section of the stealthy F-35 for mating. Building 648 may work on aircraft of similar size, sophistication and radar signature, but Lockheed’s goal is to avoid all fixed tooling. In what is known as deterministic assembly, each major section is digitally manufactured so precisely that no tooling is necessary to join them. To that end, the Skunk Works teamed with Spirit AeroSystems—which, although known widely as a commercial aircraft supplier, plays a key role in the Northrop Grumman B-21 program—on a proof-of-concept called Polaris, which allowed Lockheed to prove it could mate two major fuselage structures in minutes instead of hours or days.
Furthermore, the digital production approach also creates new opportunities to use robots. The Skunk Works displayed an Electroimpact robot—the Combined Operation: Bolting and Robotic Auto-drill (COBRA)—on the assembly floor in Building 648. The COBRA adds a new dimension to automated manufacturing. Like the facility itself, the COBRA is fully reconfigurable. A software change allows the machine to switch from drilling holes at a constant rate of one every 21 sec. in either a missile or an aircraft.
The installation, automation and the underlying digital models behind each design are the foundation of this new approach to aerospace manufacturing. The goal is to shorten the typically years-long interval between starting the design and completing production to months. Such speed would rival the Skunk Works’ record on the XP-80 and U-2 in the 1940s and 1950s, but with far more complex and finely crafted structures and systems required for the modern era. Aerospace manufacturers have chased this ideal standard for decades, but have consistently fallen short.
“What has maybe changed that calculus is the cost of technology has come down significantly,” Babione said. “So, think about what it used to cost to have a robot 20 years ago. Very few people had a robot. It’s a massive investment, and it had to have this tremendous business case.
“So, in general, that technology cost has come down significantly,” Babione continued. “At the same time our customer has raised the expectations. And we have got to compress the timeframe from concept to capability. And that comes with a significant drop in the cost of the product and service. And this is one way that we’re going to achieve those objectives.”
Building 648 is now open for business. Lockheed already has secured classified production for the facility. In time, the facility may have multiple projects ongoing at the same time, potentially ushering in a new era for the 78-year-old organization. For decades, Babione’s predecessors could rely on a stable base of production in the Skunk Works facilities in Burbank to keep the organization going, providing an experienced pool of labor for the division’s more exotic, one-off ideas.
“I need that stable base,” Babione said. “It’s been almost 20 years since the Skunk Works had a significant program, back to the F-35 [prototypes]. We need to rebuild that expertise. And these programs give us that opportunity to not only advanced cutting-edge technology, but build the muscle memory that we need to design, build and sustain.”
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