Inside UTAS Oakville

Canadian Metalworking speaks with Randy Corey, general manager of North American landing gear operations with UTAS, to learn more about the operation.

Randy Corey, General Manager North America, Landing Gear, UTC Aerospace Systems (photo: Roger Yip)

Randy Corey, General Manager North America, Landing Gear, UTC Aerospace Systems (photo: Roger Yip)

In early October 2015 the Oakville, Ontario plant of UTC Aerospace Systems celebrated the 200th shipment of main landing gear destined for an Airbus A380—the world’s largest commercial aircraft. A380 landing gear includes two wing gears and two body gears—a fully-assembled wing gear stands about 19-feet tall.

The 400,000 sq. ft. Oakville facility, first opened in 1984, is a center of excellence within the UTC Aerospace Systems (UTAS) Landing Systems unit. The Tier 1 landing gear specialists ship assemblies to major OEMs including Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier and Gulfstream.

Canadian Metalworking spoke with Randy Corey, general manager of North American landing gear operations with UTAS, to learn more about the operation. A mechanical engineer from the University of Waterloo, Corey spent years in the automotive industry before joining the Oakville facility as plant manager in 2008 (then part of Goodrich Aerospace, UTC acquired the business in 2012). He currently oversees the UTAS Landing Systems facilities in Oakville, Cleveland (Ohio), Tullahoma (Tennessee) and Fort Worth (Texas).

What is your day-to-day role?

I’m ultimately responsible for productivity and evolving our technology. I’m overseeing the lean transformation of the business and the new technologies that we bring in. It all comes down to customer schedules and making sure we achieve deliveries.

Can you explain steps you’ve taken to improve productivity at the Oakville facility?

The changes have largely been to develop a continuous flow of the product to hit the cadence of the customer. That‘s a major transition in the aerospace industry, moving away from batch processing to a lean one-piece flow that ultimately saves a tremendous amount of lead time and inventory. In last five to six years, we’ve increased our output about 40 to 50 per cent while being able to reduce our labour component by about 20 per cent. Over this period, our workforce has remained relatively stable while production rates have increased.

What other changes have you undergone to improve plant operations?

Dealing with the overall productivity level, a key driver comes from steps we’ve taken with our environmental health and safety. We’ve made a huge reduction in VOCs (volatile organic compounds) as well as “fine particulate matter.” We have legacy processes in place from existing aerospace contracts that include using chrome and cadmium types of plating. Now we’re introducing new processes including zinc-nickel, which replaces cadmium and its related heavy chemical issues. And over the next year we’re going to introduce HVOF (high velocity oxygen fuel) a type of plasma spray coating process that replaces chrome plating.

Lead Hand, Denis Hamelin, at UTAS Oakville measuring a nose gear main fitting.(Photo: Roger Yip)

Lead Hand, Denis Hamelin, at UTAS Oakville measuring a nose gear main fitting. (Photo: Roger Yip)

What materials are you machining?

Most of the machining in Oakville today is 300M steel for the main cylinders of the landing gear. As some of our programs ramp up we may need to support our facility in Tullahoma where we’re machining more titanium components. So we’re starting to develop some early R&D on titanium here in Oakville.

What machining activities take place in Oakville?

From the large rough cylinder-shaped forgings that come in the door [weighing as much as 14,000 lbs.], we do a before-heat-treat machining, where we do heavy profiling, lathe operations and boring mill operations, followed by a deburring.

From that we go out to heat treat (which is almost all done at Vac Aero here in Oakville). Then comes the after-heat machining, which includes finishing the inside diameters, the bores, the surface, the faces and all of the interface points, where we get to the final tolerances.

What machining technology do you use?

We have three generations of Droop+Rein machine tools. The older generation includes one of the only machines they ever built with six spindles—the table is about 40 feet wide and 120 feet long. The next generation includes high-speed machining cells, all 5-axis, with dedicated single-spindle machines for roughing operations and dedicated machines for finishing operations. The newest generation (the D40) does both operations in one machine. It will start on a forging with a high-torque low-speed spindle, and then it will change out the entire spindle and go into a high-speed low-torque finishing cut mode.

There are two other levels of products we use on a large scale including Tacchi out of Italy that develops our largest lathes—equipped with some proprietary technologies. And on the milling side we have Japanese-built Kuraki machines, and some Giddings and Lewis machines.

We also use mill-turns from Mori Seiki here in Oakville, and we have a large number of Mazak machines at our Tullahoma facility.

Inside the new generation Droop+Rein machine tool at UTAS Oakville.(photo: Roger Yip)

Inside the new generation Droop+Rein machine tool at UTAS Oakville. (photo: Roger Yip)

Are your machine tools dedicated to specific parts/programs?

On one of our new D40s we created a common fixture and put multiple nose gear programs across it. But on these machines it depends on the customer capacity requirements whether the machines are dedicated or flexible across multiple products. But the base machines are flexible for whatever we need to put on them.

You recently shipped the 200th set of main gear for the A380, how long have you been making those sets?

It was 2001 when Airbus awarded the A380 main landing gear contract. The first A380 flight was in 2005 and its entry into service was 2007.

Generally speaking, prior to any chip cutting, you’re looking at two to three years of design and analysis. Once the design is set, to get the first forgings for the size of products that we have can take one to two years. And then it’s another 24 to 36 months worth of qualification and flight testing before you’re into production.

It’s a long process, and it really speaks to the commitment you have to make, and the resources that you need, to support such a protracted development effort.

What is production flow like at the Oakville facility?

To give you an idea, the 737 program is our largest-volume product, and we do two shipsets per day, so right now we’re at 42 shipsets per month (two main landing gears and a nose gear). For the 777 we’re at about eight planes per month (two main gears and one nose gear). For Airbus right now we’re at about 26 A380 sets a year, and our initial production for A350-1000 will start in 2016, and in 2017 that program will be at a rate of approximately one set per month.

What other Canadian-based suppliers feed into your landing gear supply chain for assembly?

The big three that we use are Magellan, Noranco and Héroux-Devtek. That’s one of the interesting dynamics of this industry. While Héroux-Devtek is a key supplier of certain components given their capability, but they’re also a competitor.

Why is Canada such a global hotbed for landing gear?

If you go back 60 years or more there were a number of aerospace-related manufacturers that set up initially to support the war effort, with aircraft being produced in the Montreal and Toronto areas. That legacy has continued, and it has fed on itself over the past number of decades. We’ve been very fortunate being in the GTA [Greater Toronto Area] where we have adequate access to the skillsets we require, whether you’re talking design and manufacturing engineers or machinists. And for us, proximity to one of our key customers (Bombardier), the U.S. border and a major airport all makes it easier and facilitates our operation.

What’s next for UTAS Landing Systems in Oakville?

Our evolution will include new technologies and we’ll continue to grow in different ways. The introduction of HVOF and zinc-nickel surface treatments (processes we used to outsource) will allow us a greater degree of control through vertical integration.

And as part of our ongoing lean transformation, we continue to look in-house to improve our productivity. When you look at manufacturing globally, we know we’re not the lowest-cost operations from a labour perspective, so how do we compensate for that? It’s by leveraging technology and increasing our output.