BAE Systems looks to speed up F-35 production with facility

Company bosses launched the enlarged facility on 23 March in Samlesbury, Lancashire, which will enable BAE to speed up manufacturing of the F-35’s rear fuselage and tail using assembly-line technology due for completion by September this year.

The elevated monorail system will automatically pick up and move a component from one station to the next, replacing the much slower method used until now of having engineers and tools moved around the factory floor.

Going from the current rate of one component set a week to one a day required a shift to the kind of automated high-volume production methods used by the automotive industry, said Vijay Panchal, BAE’s F-35 assembly transition manager.

‘Typically the aerospace industry in the past hasn’t had the volume of aircraft,’ he told The Engineer. ‘The F-35 is fairly unique in terms of 3,000 aircraft being manufactured over its lifespan. That demands us to think in volumes of one aircraft every day.’