Flying With The Help of Faster Inspection

Vought Aircraft Industries Inc. (www.voughtaircraft.com; Hawthorne, CA) designs, fabricates and manufactures big things that go fast.  The company custom manufacturers fuselage panels, empennages, flight control surfaces, nacelles, wings, doors, and other structures for Airbus, Bell Helicopter Boeing, Cessna, Embraer, Gulfstream, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Sikorsky.  Because they tend to be very large assemblies, Vought manufactures most of its products in sections and uses holding structures in assembly to ensure they are dimensionally accurate.  This requires precise inspection, a process which, until two years ago, was slow going.  It typically took the company 16 hours to inspect a large assembly, followed by eight hours of additional inspecting and another eight hours to compile the report.  The past practice involved taking a measurement and returning to a desktop computer to analyze it using multiple software systems.

“We would see that the product was out of spec and needed to be twisted this way or that to bring it into alignment,” said Paul Evans, Vought quality assurance lead.  “We might have to do several iterations like that before we got it right. It was a very time consuming process.”

That 32-hour process now takes six hours or less, a time saver the firm credits to Verisurf software, which it started using in 2007 in anticipation of a major model switch.  The Verisurf X software provides graphic results for measurement analysis, which enables real-time comparisons between the actual product versus the solid model in Mastercam, and provides instant graphical error reports.

Vought uses a combination of laser systems to measure large structures and portable coordinate measuring machines for constructions that can be measured with a 6-ft long arm.  Verisurf X features the company’s proprietary common platform for managing all CMMs, articulating arms, laser trackers and other measuring devices.  As an added time saver, inspection capabilities, such as reverse engineering and reporting, are managed from a single user interface. -- SEA