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FIA2024 REVISITED: Aziz Tahiri of Hexagon on how it can help companies ramp up their AAM manufacturing efforts

The UK aims to launch autonomous air taxi demon­stra­tion flights by 2030, but accord­ing to Hexa­gon, eVTOL air­craft need bet­ter work­flow automa­tion, AI/ML tech, col­lab­o­ra­tion tools and sim­u­la­tions to tack­le the mas­sive hur­dle of safe­ty and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

Hexagon’s tech­nol­o­gy touch­es 90 per cent of all planes in the air today. Its exper­tise spans the entire avi­a­tion life­cy­cle, from R&D through devel­op­ment, man­u­fac­tur­ing and MRO.

Some of the world’s largest man­u­fac­tur­ers, includ­ing Air­bus and Safran, are already util­is­ing Hexagon’s vir­tu­al assem­bly and dig­i­tal twin tech­nolo­gies to future-proof the way they design, make, test and inspect their air­craft. 

In anoth­er of our in-depth inter­views from last mon­th’s Farn­bor­ough Air­show, eVTOL Insights sat down with Aziz Tahiri, Hexa­gon’s Glob­al VP Aero­space & Defence, dur­ing the show to talk more about its capa­bil­i­ties for the Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty mar­ket.

Jason Pritchard, eVTOL Insights’ Exec­u­tive Edi­tor, asks the ques­tions.

Aziz, it’s great to speak with you again. Hexa­gon has got a big pres­ence here, what are you hop­ing to get from the air­show and from an Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty per­spec­tive, can you share more about the company’s capa­bil­i­ties in this mar­ket?

Aziz Tahiri: “Aero­space is a key indus­try for us. We’re very hap­py to be here with a dou­ble size booth this year show­ing the lat­est of what we have regard­ing the pro­duc­tion ramp up. We know the demand is huge and there is a need for man­u­fac­tur­ing more air­craft with less peo­ple but with more data. So, the ques­tion is: how can we help man­u­fac­tur­ers to real­ly scale up their man­u­fac­tur­ing rates, with the same lev­el of safe­ty or qual­i­ty?

“And in terms of qual­i­ty, we are very well posi­tioned with our qual­i­ty con­trol equip­ment, but also all the qual­i­ty data that we out­put in our soft­ware.”

In the Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty mar­ket, a lot of the air­craft are get­ting close to being cer­ti­fied but man­u­fac­tur­ing is so impor­tant too. Are you able to share a lit­tle bit on the impor­tance of post-day-one oper­a­tions, as many com­pa­nies are start­ing to plan for mass pro­duc­tion?

AT: “I would say that today the chal­lenge is real­ly to out­put the air­craft. Which means basi­cal­ly, you used to have dozens of qual­i­ty inspec­tors run­ning around the fac­to­ry, try­ing to take notes on paper or Excel sheets. What we’ve done [at Hexa­gon] and what we’re show­cas­ing is auto­mat­ed qual­i­ty inspec­tion capa­bil­i­ties. We always had these non-con­tact laser scan­ning capa­bil­i­ties, which is amaz­ing on its own, but we’re now putting it on a robot and hav­ing all the soft­ware and user inter­face to allow qual­i­ty inspec­tors to man­age their tasks in record times. Work­ing 24 hours in our auto­mat­ed inspec­tion cells is real­ly key.”

Can you share more about the prod­ucts Hexa­gon is work­ing on and how they can be ben­e­fi­cial to com­pa­nies work­ing in Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty? 

AT: “The obvi­ous one for me, which is real­ly behind more than 50 years of capa­bil­i­ties we’ve devel­oped in engi­neer­ing soft­ware and sim­u­la­tion, is struc­tur­al sim­u­la­tion acoustics, or what we call mul­ti-physics sim­u­la­tion. 

“Hav­ing a very com­plete and accu­rate mod­el of an air taxi which the com­pa­ny is devel­op­ing is key because it allows them to pre­dict per­for­mance issues with­out hav­ing to spend mil­lions on pro­to­typ­ing and re-pro­to­typ­ing.”

A lot of peo­ple are ask­ing ‘when is Advanced Air Mobil­i­ty going to hap­pen? Is it two years or more like the start of the next decade’. How would you assess the cur­rent land­scape in the mar­ket when it comes to the man­u­fac­tur­ing side?

AT: “The most press­ing chal­lenge I see as of today is real­ly these new fly­ing vehi­cles over our cities need to be very safe from a soci­etal accep­tance point of view. Reg­u­la­tion is anoth­er major road block­er, but I tend to believe that reg­u­la­tion will hap­pen; we know how to pre­dict routes and man­age fly­ing vehi­cles in the air, so to be safe and hav­ing the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion ele­ment is real­ly key for pas­sen­gers to accept it. Also, to accept fly­ing with or with­out a pilot.

“I would say that we need to allow com­pa­nies to be very com­fort­able with their capa­bil­i­ties and the recov­ery sce­nar­ios of lend­ing a vehi­cle because some issues hap­pen with­out risk­ing any­thing. Nei­ther for the pas­sen­ger, nor for the peo­ple in the streets. I would say the time­line is tricky, because putting all these air­craft in the air may also add con­ges­tion. There is a trade-off that needs to hap­pen, and we need to bal­ance all these things.

“These vehi­cles will not be easy, but we know how to man­u­fac­ture fly­ing vehi­cles and inspect them. We just need to make sure it also makes eco­nom­ic via­bil­i­ty; main­tain­ing the busi­ness case of Urban Air Mobil­i­ty, with­out com­pro­mis­ing at all on safe­ty.”

We talked a bit on our recent pod­cast about sim­u­la­tion mod­el­ling. Are you able to share a lit­tle bit more about the ben­e­fits of this and how Hexa­gon can help com­pa­nies which are going down this route?

AT: “This is where we have a unique posi­tion­ing and val­ue propo­si­tion. On one side, we talked about how we can pro­duce very accu­rate mod­els and help reuse engi­neer­ing costs and time. On the oth­er side, I said it’s all about qual­i­ty and safe­ty. 

“Qual­i­ty and safe­ty mea­sure­ments and data can now also be inte­grat­ed with­in the mod­el­ling and the engi­neer­ing, to get ready for man­u­fac­tur­ing, to cor­rect and reduce the gaps between these two worlds: this per­fect CAD nom­i­nal dig­i­tal world, and the real world of design and engi­neer­ing – the one that needs to hap­pen on the shop floor to make the parts. 

“This is what we are actu­al­ly offer­ing to our cus­tomers while they’re engi­neer­ing their new fly­ing vehi­cles. They can see what is man­u­fac­turable and what is not: What kind of resources need to be pre­pared? What kind of engi­neers needs to be trained? Which equip­ment will be used? And real­ly sim­u­late all the man­u­fac­tur­ing process ahead of time. So, sim­u­lat­ing the vehi­cle and sim­u­lat­ing the fac­to­ry and process­es that need to be deployed.

“And once they’re being deployed, using our metrol­o­gy and inspec­tion capa­bil­i­ties to mea­sure the real­i­ty of that the­o­ret­i­cal mod­el. And feed­back loops that the engi­neer­ing team can use to fine-tune that and make sure there is no gap between a vir­tu­al mod­el and the real air taxi being man­u­fac­tured.”

And what might the next cou­ple of years have in store for Hexa­gon?

AT: “What our cus­tomers are ask­ing us for is allow­ing their engi­neers to col­lab­o­rate more. So, one key ele­ment of what we’re devel­op­ing is you just bring more col­lab­o­ra­tive, engi­neer­ing tools for engi­neers to share infor­ma­tion back and forth, iter­ate faster in these engi­neer­ing loops so that the fly­ing vehi­cle can be cer­ti­fied with the right ver­sion of data and right lev­el of con­fi­dence with safe­ty.

“Col­lab­o­ra­tion is our first ongo­ing chal­lenge, and our tools now need to be very col­lab­o­ra­tive. A sec­ond ele­ment is real­ly about allow­ing the post-oper­a­tional peo­ple on the shop floor to be more proac­tive and even pre­dic­tive; try­ing to antic­i­pate issues: “How do you col­lect and share data with the right stake­hold­ers, so that it can real­ly con­tribute to this in advance? 

So that’s the sec­ond major area we’re going to be work­ing on – not only try­ing to mea­sure things but col­lect the infor­ma­tion and hand it over to the right peo­ple at the right time, so they can take extreme­ly fast deci­sions and be proac­tive in their way of work­ing.”

Any final thoughts?

AT: “We’re liv­ing in an amaz­ing trans­for­ma­tion in the indus­try. I am an aero­space engi­neer and 20 years ago, I was so hap­py to have grad­u­at­ed. But I have to say that in the last 10 years, I have seen some very con­ven­tion­al things hap­pen­ing, which are a bit archa­ic. But over the last two to three years, I have seen a com­plete revival. COVID-19 was going to kill the indus­try, but it prob­a­bly revived us.

“What I see today is a lot of inno­va­tion, new projects and new pro­grams. We have sev­er­al demos here on our booth, where we’re show­ing how we’ve cre­at­ed research groups with our key Euro engine cus­tomers and aerostruc­ture cus­tomers, where we were devel­op­ing the new gen­er­a­tion of engine and struc­tures.

“I want to see how these inno­va­tion prob­lems are going to turn into new pro­grams, new fly­ing vehi­cles and new modes of trans­porta­tion for tomor­row, and we are part of it!”

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Jason Pritchard

Jason Pritchard is the Editor of eVTOL Insights. He holds a BA from Leicester's De Montfort University and has worked in Journalism and Public Relations for more than a decade. Outside of work, Jason enjoys playing and watching football and golf. He also has a keen interest in Ancient Egypt.

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