N-numbered routes in France are sort of like our better state roads or U.S.-numbered highways. Some are dual-lane divided, some just two lanes. Like most airports, the one at Tarbes has just such a highway that runs by the southeast perimeter of the airfield. When you tip out of the inevitable roundabout, there it is and there they are: dozens upon dozens of the great moveable cathedrals of modern industrial society–the transport airliner, lined up wing to wing. There are only a few places on the planet to see this. Tarbes is one, nearby Toulouse is another and of course Everett and Renton, Washington. (Airports don’t count; the airplanes aren’t parked cheek by jowl, usually.)
But I’m exaggerating in saying there are dozens and dozens at Tarbes; more like 15 or 20, if that. And they aren’t coming fresh out of a factory here, but are flown in here to either die or be repurposed to customers who can’t afford or don’t need the efficiency of a state-of-the-art twin-engine airliner capable of spanning the Atlantic. Want a cheap four-engine A340? A company at Tarbes called Tarmac can probably get you into one for the price a used Citation. You’re on your own for buying the gas.
In a way, those airplanes I saw at Tarbes have come full circle. Across the field is Daher, builder of the popular single-engine turboprop, the TBM. And while most of us in the U.S. know Daher only for the TBM, in global aerospace it’s better known as a manufacturer of components that go into the Airbus line that will, inevitably, make their way back to Tarbes for recycling.
I knew this about Daher, but I had no idea of the volume of aerospace work it does that isn’t the TBM. Daher’s Philipe de Segovia showed me around the plant last week and the quick walk around took more than two hours. On a second, more methodical walk through, I shot video of the various activities there–at least what I was allowed to shoot–and I’ll have that ready sometime next week.
Like so many aircraft plants, Daher is a study in the evolution of both aviation and the processes of building aircraft. But its history is longer and richer than any other factory I’ve been in. The original building established by Morane-Saulnier around 1911 is still in use. The company built aircraft during World War I but its history took a bizarre turn during World War II. After the French Army collapsed during the Battle of France, Tarbes–which is in the very south of the country, in the Pyrenees foothills on the Spanish border– became part of Vichy France and was nominally unoccupied. Nonetheless, the German military impressed the factory to do repair work and production on theFocke-Wulf 190, among other aircraft. (Correction here: an earlier version said the DO 17 was produced at Tarbes, but de Segovia contacted me and said that wasn’t the case.)
Some of the plant’s machinery dates to the 1940s and it’s tantalizing to imagine some of those machines built German aircraft. But that machinery was retired after the war. The oldest equipment builds parts for the still-supported TB-series airplanes. When I walked through the plant, I saw bins labeled for TB20 and 21s. As for the TBM, its production processes long ago left the old machinery behind. For instance, there’s a 1940s-era metal stretching machine that’s been updated with digital controls. You see a lot of that sort of thing in these older plants. But it doesn’t stretch metal for the TBM. The airplane now uses lighter and stronger composite parts for the compound bends that were once coaxed into metal.
Composites are a big part of what Daher does and it does big parts. In one shop area, I was shown the composite gear door for an A400M that, were it not for its squarish shape and compound bend, was bigger than the wing of Cherokee. The company also has a line dedicated entirely to gear doors for the A350; think two-car garage doors and add a third and the size is about right. Some months ago, I was talking to Daher’s Nic Chabbert who told me that aerospace companies subcontract a lot of work, including major subassemblies such as doors, control surfaces and entire subsections, including the staggeringly large front end of the A380 that, yes, Daher builds. And competition being what it is, these prime contractors want it ever cheaper so that forces companies like Daher to find efficiencies where they can.
Find efficiencies they do, too. I was shown a new line being developed to produce composite layups robotically, including, if I read it right, cutting and placing the material, applying resin and shuttling the thing off to giant autoclaves that reminded me of some of the mountain tunnels we rode through in the Pyrenees. Composite still requires hand work, however, to trim up the mold flash and install the hard parts such as metal hinges, latches and fasteners. You may have read that Boeing is using robotic riveting and Daher is getting there too for sub work it’s doing for Dassualt, among others.
When I asked Chabbert recently if this sort of thing could trickle down to the TBM, he said Daher wouldn’t rule it out. But at 40 to 60 units a year, the only way I can see it working is if TBM production piggybacks on investment with a higher margin and in that sense, Daher seems to be another version of Rotax economics. Rotax’s aircraft engines are a rump on its production of recreational engines, but the component manufacture benefits from the factory’s sheer scale.
You can see a little of that at Daher. The factory has a numerically controlled hydroform machine that spits out a million parts a year. I doubt if TBM manufacture alone would support that. I got the impression it makes a lot of stuff in the same way the Rotax factory makes a bunch of parts that happen to also go into airplane engines. Anyway, even with that level of automation, there’s a lot of handwork just in cleaning up the parts. An entire platoon of benchworkers was touching up with files and checking bend angles with gauges. Do they do that at Airbus and Boeing? I suspect so.
Riveted metal airplanes like the TBM will always be time-consuming builds. The airplane has about 40,000 rivets and I watched mechanics hand setting and bucking them. Even so, just as I reported on Mooney having squeezed out build hours from the M20s, so has Daher done with the TBM line. The new 930s coming off the line are more efficiently built than the TBM 700 was nearly 30 years ago and whatever comes next will probably be more efficient yet. But those gains are still likely to be in the margins for the same reasons they always have been: low volume and limited return on limited investment capital. But the story at Daher appears to be the same as it is at Continental, Lycoming and Mooney. As new machinery becomes more affordable and more flexible, even low-volume airplane companies can benefit from its use.
