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BOEINGS PHANTOM WORKS

When in 1997 Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged into the largest aerospace company in the world, Boeing adopted a policy of continuing the most successful parts of both companies and either disposing of or closing the ones which were ineffectual. The advanced research and development unit that McDonnell Douglas had founded as its Phantom Works in 1986 not only survived the merger but under Boeing's management its significance within the company has attained undreamed-of heights.

Dave O. Swain, president of Phantom Works, describing the role of his organisation, says, "We have dreams for the 21st century. It is our mission to convert these dreams to reality. But that is not just a matter of dreams, it is also business."

Phantom Works is split over two sites, Seattle in Washington and Seal Beach in southern California, but within the Boeing Company it is operated like a virtual organisation. The 4,000-strong workforce is organised in small project teams which work at different sites in the USA. Phantom Works acts as technology service provider to the various Boeing divisions. As far as Swain is concerned, the other divisions are his customers.

Integration of the various teams into the Boeing Company as a whole has some highly beneficial effects: the Phantom Works engineers feed their knowledge to the individual business units while at the same time they can take expertise out of particular divisions and apply it productively elsewhere in the company.

Methods which, for example, work well for the production of military aircraft no longer have to be reinvented in the civil aircraft divisions, as in the past. This reduces costs and enables new technologies to be implemented rapidly throughout the company.

There are currently around 500 projects in progress at the Phantom Works. The task of the staff working on those projects is "merely" to identify and develop the technologies and production processes which will be needed to realise designs which in some cases are amazingly futuristic. Phantom Works provides the Boeing board with expert input into the decisions that have to be made prior to launching any programme. Whether a Phantom Works project will develop into a programme is decided by the Boeing board on the basis of the market situation.

Some of the most spectacular Phantom Works project are described below.

The American armed forces are increasingly pinning their hopes on the deployment of unmanned air vehicles for dangerous missions. Together with the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Phantom Works has developed the Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV). The primary mission of UCAV, according to George Muellner, General Manager of Phantom Works, is the suppression of enemy air defences (SEAD). The jet-powered unmanned fighters have a stealthy design. They will be stored in transport containers, flown by C-17 close to where they are to be deployed and will begin their life as aircraft there. Initially Boeing will build and test two prototypes. Roll-out of the two UCAVs is expected later this year and flight trials will begin in 2001.

A model of the Blended Wing Body (BWB), a flying wing, has already been tested. Another model with an 11 m wing span will fly in 2002. Boeing has identified two potential applications for the BWB, a tanker aircraft or a passenger aircraft. According to Muellner, the flying wing concept is 15 to 20% more efficient than conventional aircraft. Three passenger versions could be built, a 250-seat version, a 450-seat version and a 600-seat version (see also the report in FLUG REVUE 9/2000). Muellner reckons it is technically feasible for the first member of the BWB family to enter service as early as 2010.

The Advanced Theater Transport (ATT) is a radical new concept for a battle zone transporter. This is a four-engined turboprop with tilt-wings but no empennage that will be capable of taking off and landing on air strips only 200m long, yet it will be able to transport between two and four times the load of a Lockheed C-130J Hercules. Its short take-off and landing (STOL) capability will be made possible by the tilt-wings, which will permit approach speeds of between 60 and 90 km/h. Once the aircraft is cruising, the wings will revert to the normal position, enabling the ATT to achieve a cruising speed of around 700 km/h.

Within Boeing the unconventional design is known as the Super Frog, due mainly to its unusual appearance and its ability to "hop" onto extremely short runways. The technologies required to implement the Super Frog are under development, and a tethered model of the ATT is currently being tested at Phantom Works.

The Canard Rotor/Wing is one of the projects inherited from McDonnell Douglas. During take-off, landing and slow flight, the Canard/Rotor Wing uses its two-blade rotor like a helicopter. During cruise the rotor is fixed in one position and delivers the necessary lift as an aerofoil. Two prototypes of the Canard Rotor/Wing are under construction at Boeing in Mesa, Arizona, and should undergo their first flight in 2001.

As well as amazing projects like these, Phantom Works staff are also engaged on less spectacular tasks aimed at securing Boeing's future through process optimisation. Newly developed manufacturing technologies are integrated into existing programmes in order, for example, to reduce production times and bring down manufacturing costs. As an example of this, Muellner told FLUG REVUE in Seal Beach about a new composite horizontal stabilizer that has been developed for the C-17 and has 90% fewer parts than the previous aluminium tail assembly. The number of tools required to manufacture the structure was correspondingly reduced by 70%. Compared with the aluminium stabilizer, it was also 50% cheaper to produce. Another advantage is the fact that the new unit weighs 20% less than the old one. All C-17's from serial number 51 have the new part.

Another Phantom Works project is a new welding technique known as "Friction Stir Welding". This entails a welding head which rotates at high speed moving along the seam while applying high pressure. The metal along the weld joint heats up so strongly during this process that both parts melt briefly at that point and join together. The resulting weld joint is 30% more resilient than a conventional one. Moreover, this welding technology is quicker, more accurate and cheaper. The new method is already proving itself in the manufacture of fuel tanks for Boeing's Delta family of launchers. There are plans to use it in aircraft construction as well.

The Phantom Works engineers see themselves as providing a technology fire fighting service to the company. Whenever development work is not running as planned in any of Boeing's business units, Phantom Works' role is to jump in and sort out the problem.

Dave Swain, head of Phantom Works, is aware that many of the projects studied in his division are never implemented. "If just a third of what we develop were implemented, that would be great."

From page 22 of FLUG REVUE 10/2000