(WICHITA, KS) – Private planes are booming. According to the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA), 2005 was an all-time record for billings and a four-year high for deliveries of general-aviation aircraft, defined as all aviation other than scheduled commercial airline and military aircraft. The hot pace is continuing in 2006, as GAMA reports the highest first-quarter billings for general-aviation aircraft in history, $4.0 billion compared to $2.9 billion for the first quarter of 2005 (+37%). First-quarter shipments totaled 845 aircraft, a 34.1% increase over the first three months of last year.

    “All segments of the general-aviation manufacturing industry are continuing to increase at strong levels,” says the report. And the strongest of the strong is Cessna Aircraft Company (Wichita, KS), a subsidiary of Textron Inc. In 2005, Cessna delivered 1,157 aircraft and reported revenues of $3.5 billion, making it the world’s largest manufacturer of general-aviation airplanes. For business jets alone, as opposed to the single-engine piston or single-engine turboprops it also supplies, Cessna is essentially sold out for production and delivery of about 300 jets in 2006, and at the end of the first quarter had about 290 orders for delivery in 2007. The company delivered 249 business jets in 2005.

    The mandate for growth comes right from the top. “We are going to be stepping up each quarter in small amounts to reach the projection of shipping 300 Citations this year,” said Lewis Campbell, chairman, president, and CEO of Textron Inc. And expect Cessna to maintain an aggressive timetable for introducing new plane models. “There is a re-modernization plan for the entire fleet,” he adds. Over a five-to-10-year product-development span, the company is looking at everything from smaller to bigger.

Deep Roots
     Cessna traces its history back to June 1911, when Clyde Cessna, a Rago, Kansas farmer, became the first person between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains to build and fly a wood-and-fabric airplane. In 1924, Cessna partnered with Lloyd Stearman and Walter H. Beech to form the Travel Air Manufacturing Company in Wichita for manufacturing biplanes. Three years later, Cessna left Travel Air to form his own company to build monoplanes, Cessna Aircraft Company. (Stearman later became president of Lockheed Aircraft in the 1930s and Beech founded Beech Aircraft, now known as the Beechcraft division of Raytheon.) Since 1927, more than 187,000 Cessna airplanes have been delivered to nearly every country in the world. The global fleet of more than 4,500 Citations is the world’s largest fleet of business jets and the more than 150,000 Cessna single-engine piston airplanes also is the world’s largest.

    Components manufacturing at Cessna has grown to world-class levels as well. Cessna’s Components Manufacturing Facility (CMF) in Wichita is a complex of buildings exceeding a million square feet and employing more than 1300 employees. Processes within the CMF include computer numerically controlled (CNC) machining, sheet metal and extrusion processing, composites fabrication, plastics, tubes and cables, welding assembly, and precision assembly. CMF’s stated vision is to be the aerospace industry’s premier supplier of fabricated components and assemblies and its strategy zeroes in on four areas:

• Exceeding customer expectations in quality, cost, and delivery performance.
• Implementing and refining world-class production processes to enhance safety, productivity, and innovation.
• Attracting, developing, and retaining talented people.
• Executing the manufacturing strategy to balance capacity, capability, and market requirements.

    To do so, Cessna closely monitors four key performance indicators in c omponents m anufacturing: safety (total recordable incidence rate and lost time incidence rate); quality (parts per million); on-time scheduling (percentage on-time deliveries); and average flow days, or how long it takes orders to flow through processing.

    The goal is achieving competitive advantage, differentiation, and growth. In fact, Cessna has a saying: “Any behavior that can raise your stock price is core. Everything else is context.”

Executing the Strategy
     Over the past five years, Cessna has waged an all-out effort to improve productivity up and down its supply chain. It established five Centers of Excellence within the Components Manufacturing Facility in structural composites, tube and cable, complex sheetmetal fabrication, CNC machining, and precision assembly, which the company regularly benchmarks against outside suppliers to maintain cutting-edge performance.

    The CNC machining Center of Excellence is largely centered around producing landing gears, primarily consisting of trunnions, trailing links, and barrels, although the machine shop produces thousands of other parts. Over the years, hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in new technology to achieve world-class production levels. Among the investments are new multi-tasking Integrex machining centers, horizontal machining centers, and Palletech manufacturing cells from Mazak Corp. (Florence, KY).

    Trailing links, milled out of steel forgings, required processing on two different machines with a total of five different setups and took approximately 40 hours to produce. Going forward, Cessna plans to use their new five-axis, multi-tasking Integrex e-1060V machining centers, using standard cutters and running the same processes, produces trailing links in six hours on a single setup. Single setups are possible on these complex, five-axis parts because the e-1060V’s milling spindle can tilt up to 150 degrees for both horizontal and vertical machining operations as well as angle boring and milling on multiple faces. The main table can turn large-diameter workpieces in the same setup, further reducing throughput time.

    In addition, the e-1060V is connected to a double-stack Palletech Manufacturing System for automatically shuttling pallets in and out of the machining center and keeping the spindles turning untended.

    Another single-level Palletech system is integrated with four Mazak FH 480 horizontal machining centers for making flap-track stiffeners. Over the past nine years, Cessna moved from two FH-480s to adding two more and the Palletech system. “Productivity has gone up 200% over those nine years, and we now have one operator running four machines,” says Danny Garner, a 33-year veteran of the Cessna machine shop. Setups are done offline and the machines are always running, he adds.

    In fact, a cross-functional team at the CNC machining Center of Excellence received Cessna’s 2006 Chairman’s Award for Innovation by opening up more than 2000 hours of capacity by finding more efficient ways to machine XLS links out of titanium. “It was a combination of engineering, software, and processing capabilities,” says John Moore, who operates Mazak’s FH6800 horizontal machining centers and Palletech system. “Applying new technology and working together as a team saved upwards of $1.5 million.”

Cleaner, Safer Environment
     Future plans for Cessna’s CNC shop call for replacing 12 vertical machining centers with four five-axis multi-tasking e-machines, according to Jim Mercer. “Not only are we anticipating the kind of results we’ve seen so far, such as moving from five setups to one, we’re reclaiming significant interior real estate,” he explains. “We’re a lot safer and cleaner as a result.”

    Having a common base of machines means Cessna’s shop can also take advantage of modular fixturing, which it also makes in-house. “We’re in the process of optimizing 50 to 60 jobs, including using common vices that can process a job from a single position and using a team of programmers to program them all,” Mercer explains.  Processing times are in the process of falling from hours to under an hour, depending on the part, while quality is going up due to the single-point fixturing. Multi-tasking Integrex programs on the Mazatrol conversational programming CNC are also shared with outside suppliers so Cessna’s supply base can match the company for productivity.

Getting Lean
    Personal aircraft are long-lead items. New models may take three or four years to come to market, and an order for a new aircraft today can take as long as 18 months. Cessna is on a mission to change that.

    The company sees itself as getting to the best-possible position of being able to respond to aircraft customers, and time savings and productivity are the keys. “Our philosophy is to constantly improve our capabilities, not be everything to everybody,” Mercer says. To that end, Cessna began working with the University of Tennessee in the late 1990s to adopt lean manufacturing techniques to improve efficiencies. The evidence is plainly on display: shelves and bins in assembly areas are easily visually checked for components, and custom carts are employed to bring components to assembly stations for such parts as rudder pedals, mixer boxes, and other assemblies.

    The results, as measured by Cessna’s key performance indicators, are encouraging. Over the last five years, the quality incidence rate has gone down from 11,100 parts per million to 2,000. The safety total recordable incidence rate is down to 4.5 from 10.3 while flow days have moved from 15 days to 12.

    In the meantime, Cessna’s Centers of Excellence strategy continues to mature. Strategic reviews and competitive analysis will continue and scheduling and on-time delivery are on track to achieve world-class levels. “We supply high-tolerance complex parts, and technology changes so fast that we see getting lean as being an ongoing process of engaging our people and equipment to produce the best,” says Mercer. “We’re using lean to grow the business.”