Canadian test centres and accelerators join NATO DIANA network

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  10 mars 2020 | Local, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Coronavirus shaking up America’s defense industry

  By: Joe Gould and Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON ― The U.S. aerospace and defense sector is feeling the impact of the coronavirus, with companies limiting travel, defense trade events scuttled and contingency planning underway. As stocks fell sharply Monday on a combination of coronavirus fears and plunging oil prices, defense firms were girding for the worst and looking to the White House for guidance. The comments came days after spread of the coronavirus forced the weeklong closure of two F-35 related facilities in Italy and Japan―a sign the outbreak had begun to impact operations within the American defense industrial base. “The normal ways of doing business are definitely going to change,” said Aerospace Industries Association CEO Eric Fanning. “We're trying to get to the place where we're not reacting on a day-to-day basis to what's happening and getting in front of some of these things and maybe making some proactive decisions. But everyone is kind of looking to everyone else to take the lead on how to address this.” Lockheed, Raytheon and Honeywell were among dozens of companies that pulled out of last month's Singapore Air Show, which is typically the largest defense trade show in Asia―and SXSW, a show AIA participates in, was cancelled. The two offer a glimpse into how fears of corona virus could impact other defense trade shows and conferences. “It felt like a ghost town. It definitely was a strange experience,” Fanning said about the Singapore conference. While it's easy to overstate the importance of trade shows in cementing major deals, the deals announced at the shows are often worked out in advance, Fanning said. Still, the shows are still valuable for face-to-face networking between international defense officials and industry. As of Monday, the National Defense Industrial Association still planned to hold its Special Operations Forces Industry Conference in Tampa, Fla., this May. Its 2020 Pacific Operational Science and Technology Conference in Honolulu was ongoing this week, with more than 700 attendees, a spokeswoman said. At least one major defense firm, Boeing, has limited its employees to “business-essential” travel, and it has been rescheduling some events, reducing face-to-face meetings in favor of virtual meetings, enabling telecommuting when possible. “These measures are temporary and aimed to prevent the spread of the virus, shorten its impact and ensure the health and safety of our employees as well as the general public," a Boeing spokesman said. The virus has infected more than 110,000 people worldwide, and Italy on Sunday followed China's lead in quarantining a big swath of its country in hopes of corralling the spread. That sparked more fears in the financial markets that quarantines would snarl supply chains for companies even more than they already have. While COVID-19's long term impacts on the defense aerospace industry may take time to manifest, they could be complicated by the uncertainty of the financial market and ongoing trade wars with China, according to Fanning and others. “Supply chains are global, they're inter-related, they're incredibly complex. Having real good situational awareness into them is difficult to begin with, then you add any instability on top of it, it gets harder. And this definitely is added to that,” Fanning said. The new coronavirus is now spreading on every continent except Antarctica and hurting consumer spending, industrial production, and travel. As COVID-19 spreads around the world, many investors feel helpless in trying to estimate how much it will hurt the economy and corporate profits, and the easiest response to such uncertainty may be to get out. After initially taking an optimistic view on the virus — hoping that it would remain mostly in China and cause just a short-term disruption — investors are realizing they likely woefully underestimated it. On Monday, the Dow Jones U.S. Aerospace & Defense Index was down 26 percent over the last month, lagging the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which was down 18 percent. “Defense should do relatively better [than consumer sectors], but it's not gonna be immune,” said Byron Callan, a policy research expert at Capital Alpha Partners. “It's gonna catch a mild fever where, you know, there are gonna be other parts of the U.S. economy that are gonna be in a critical situation." “Buy-America” regulations and other controls mean the U.S. defense industry's supply chains may be less susceptible to disruption than some consumer sectors, where reliance on China-made components is more widespread―and few, if any supply chains are as globally linked as the F-35's, said U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Defense and Aerospace Export Council's president, Keith Webster. “I would say in the U.S. defense sector's supply chain is less vulnerable than maybe a product in the commercial sector, but we'll have to see,” Webster said. “If this continues across the F-35 partner nations, with their industrial sharing, one could see an impact.” On the flip side, China's weeks-long factory closures could eventually see parallels in the U.S., if the virus is not quickly contained. White collar employees may be able to telecommute, but if skilled laborers are forced to stay home, that could mean problems for the primes and their lower-tier suppliers. “Are there parallels to China in the U.S.? We don't know,” Webster said. “The first step is containment, and the next step is mitigation. China went into mitigation very quickly, which is keeping everybody home. We're just beginning to see that thought process here.” Short of factory closings, factory workers staying home for school closures or to care for sick relatives could trigger work slow downs, particularly at the lower tiers of the supply chain, especially the ones that rely on smaller pools of workers. Those companies could suffer too if they rely on the commercial side of the aerospace sector, which is expected to be harder hit, Callan said. “You can see the ramifications on the pace of work, but it's not like the airline industry or the cruise ship industry where all of a sudden none of your customers show up,” Callan said, adding: “There could be a cascading effect from some commercial aerospace. Again, it's at very, very small level, but it's still a factor.” The Associated Press and Aaron Mehta contributed to this report. https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/03/09/coronavirus-shaking-up-americas-defense-industry/

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  5 octobre 2021 | Local, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Contracts for October 1, 2021

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  18 décembre 2019 | Local, Aérospatial

  PropWorks: Sustained growth over 2 decades

  by Ken Pole Ever since French engineer Henri Giffard flew a hydrogen-filled dirigible 27 kilometres from Paris to Elancourt in September 1852, the propeller was for nearly a century the only way to sustain powered flight. It would be another 51 years before Orville and Wilbur Wright used this “airscrew” technology in the first flight of a powered fixed-wing aircraft at Kitty Hawk, N.C. The Wright brothers also came up with the idea of adding a twist to each blade, giving a more consistent angle of attack. Despite the advent and evolution of jets since the early 1940s, propellers have remained the preferred option for smaller aircraft. But, as with all things mechanical, they require maintenance and repair. That has enabled Winnipeg-based PropWorks Propeller Systems Inc. to become the largest company of its kind in Western Canada. “Winnipeg is where we started, on the fringe of James Richardson International Airport,” company president Jim Ross, one of the founding investors, told Skies. “The company was incorporated in October 1999 and we moved into our building in December 1999.” Winnipeg is home to about two-thirds of the total staff of 30 with the rest at its shop in Edmonton. PropWorks is now privately held by Ross along with a pair of Calgary-based investors, Lorne Gray, who owns the Aircraft Canada sales and appraisal firm, and AvMax Group Inc. “I'm the only constant,” he laughed, quickly adding that some of his employees also are long-term. Before the company was founded, Ross spent 15 years with Cessna Aircraft Co., doing finance and some marketing until it shut down its Winnipeg facility in 1992. So he began marketing for several aviation-related companies, one of which was Western Propeller. When Western decided to close the Winnipeg facility seven years later, to focus on their Edmonton and Vancouver centres, Ross and an original group of investors bought the equipment, moved it into a leased 6,500-square-foot building and began operations with just five employees. It relocated to a new 12,000-square-foot building in April 2015. The Edmonton shop, which opened in December 2006, was moved in December 2017 to a 14,000-square-foot building at Villeneuve Airport, the area's main general aviation and flight training hub. PropWorks' employees, whose experience tallies up to more than 150 years, provide services which “meet or exceed” original equipment manufacturers' specifications. “Sometimes we'll go an extra step with such things with non-destructive testing that we feel gives our customers a bit of added comfort,” Ross explained. “We have a dedicated non-destructive testing room” where blades, hubs and related components are tested before propellers are reassembled and balanced. NDT procedures include magnetic particle inspection, liquid penetrants, eddy current and ultrasonic inspection. In addition to being an Avia Propeller Service Centre, PropWorks overhauls and repairs most models of Hamilton Standard, Hamilton Sundstrand, McCauley, Dowty, MT, Sensenich and Hartzell propellers. (On a historical note, Ohio-based Hartzell dates to 1917 when Robert Hartzell, a pilot whose family owned a hardwood lumber factory and who had noticed a high failure rate in wood propellers, began producing hand-carved walnut units at the suggestion of longtime friend Orville Wright.) To this day, Hartzell prizes and cultivates customer loyalty in having built its global reputation, and so does PropWorks, which has customers in Canada, the U.S. and around the world. Ross said that as with most businesses, “it's about the people as much as the product.” One of his people is director of maintenance Mike Hudec, who had been with Western Propeller and now is his longest-term employee. Cliff Arntson, manager in Edmonton and Mike Wagner, assistant manager in Edmonton have a combined 84 years experience with propellers. Much of the U.S. business is with customers in the border markets of Minnesota and the Dakotas. PropWorks has three trucks which pick up the propellers for work in Winnipeg and Edmonton. “Our customers like that service,” said Ross. His most distant customer is AvMax, which has a base in Nairobi, Kenya, and he has other large customers primarily Canada and U.S. based. PropWorks draws on a variety of sources for its employees, including the Stevenson Campus of Red River College in Winnipeg. They come out of the aviation maintenance engineer (AME) stream but are not certified AMEs because they haven't gone through the requisite apprentice program when they join PropWorks. “They can't do that in a propeller shop because that wouldn't give them a broad enough base to qualify as AMEs,” said Ross. “There's no AME licence for propellers; there was at one time but not for many years now.” The general preference is “somebody with a good mechanical aptitude who we can put in our own training program,” he added. “It takes one to two years for them to become proficient.” Asked to explain the difference between overhaul and repair, Ross said the former involves disassembly, discarding parts mandated for replacement, installing new ones and then putting the entire assembly through NDT before it's painted, reassembled and balanced. That means it's a “zero time” propeller when it leaves the shop. Repairs, on the other hand, can involve a range of things such as dealing with blade nicks or leaking hub seals. If that's all that is done, the propeller leaves the shop as “time continued.” Like everything in aviation, propellers have long since evolved since those early fixed wood two-bladed configurations. “The simple ones nowadays are the fixed-pitch propellers that you'd see on your most basic flight training airplane,” said Ross, who is part-owner of a Cessna 172 and has about 1,000 hours logged. “Then it goes all the way up, through two-bladed constant-speed propellers to three-, four- and even five-bladed propellers.” The most complex ones are Hamilton Sundstrand propellers on the Dash 8 twin turboprop introduced by de Havilland Canada in 1984 and last built by Bombardier Aerospace in 2005. “They simply take more time,” said Ross. Then there are some which can justifiably called vintage, such as the Hamilton Standard three-bladed propellers on Second World War-era Douglas DC-3s but these are “fairly standard.” Ross noted that PropWorks donated one for the equally old North American Harvard Mark II in the Commonwealth Air Training Plan Museum in Brandon, Man. The company is doing more composites, a capacity which required “a substantial investment” in equipment, including an autoclave to heat the laminates. Asked what the future might hold, Ross replied that while “we've just had our best year ever,” he hesitated to predict the “hectic” growth of the past 10 years would continue. “The key to growth is not necessarily going out to find new customers. It's adding to our capabilities – that way more customers are likely to send their work to us.” While he could only guess at the number of corporate or private propeller-driven aircraft in Canada, he did venture that “it's not a dying market” which bodes well for the future. https://www.skiesmag.com/news/propworks-sustained-growth-over-2-decads