Leonardo has cut production time for carbon-fibre tiltrotor blades from 20 weeks to 3 days through the use of advanced CNC metrology from MSP.

The company has also reduced its alignment process from days to 5 minutes, cut its predicted scrap rate from 95 per cent to zero per cent and removed the need for fixtures during alignment.

David Madigan, tooling design engineer at Leonardo, says: “To align our parts, we would normally probe and measure parts using the CAD, but as the composite blades are often all different and never conform to this data, we had to find another way.”

MSP’s PerfectPart suite, including NC-Checker and NC-PartLocator, was applied to the programme. NC-Checker monitors the geometric performance of CNC machines to ensure blades can be machined to tolerance. NC-PartLocator addresses blade distortion by generating a best fit alignment in six degrees of freedom.

Madigan says: “The tiltrotor blades are low-volume and high-value, so you don’t want to risk scrapping any. NC-Checker allows us to monitor the machine tool in a simple way and gives us the confidence that no error on the machine will negatively impact the parts.”

He adds: “NC-PartLocator’s alignment results can be quite surprising. The software often shows that the blade should be somewhere else entirely, even when it doesn’t look any different on the surface.”

Leonardo has described the transformation as “night and day compared to traditional methods”.