So, I was watching an episode of Jay Leno's garage where he spoke to Lamborghini about their super car, the Sesto Elemento. This thing is made from carbon fibre, as you would expect, and weighs in at 999 kg dry with a V10 and 4WD system.
The point that got my attention however was the manufacturing process for the carbon fibre chassis, or "tub". Apparently they have developed some sort of proprietary forging process, and the amazing thing is that it takes only 8 minutes to manufacture the part! In the video, Jay comments that McLaren spent 4000 hrs on building their "tub" for the F1. There were very sparse details, but that sure sounds like a huge savings.
My mind is now imagining this process for stamping out hundreds or thousands of cheap (as compared to hand layed up parts) fuselage sections and other structures.
Could this be a future possibility for mass production of light aircraft?
Yes, although carbon fibre has some interesting engineering challenges in aircraft where heat and vibration are certain.
Heat and vibration are certain in cars too, especially sports cars and F1 cars!
But the implications of failure are very different. I know a lot of people involved in the testing of these products and carbon fibre in aviation has a lot of challenges.
I think the cost of a GA plane comes from a number of areas with roughly comparable contribution, and most of them one can't do anything about unless the volume was jacked up way beyond any plausible size of the market.
For example a big chunk comes in the form of the engine and the avionics. Sure a manufacturer will get "OEM pricing" but a $60k engine isn't going to go for $10k OEM. My guess is that it will be $40k. Same with avionics - they are very expensive.
The airframe itself is very cheap in materials - of the order of $1000 in aluminium. The rest is labour - some man-months of drilling, riveting, etc.
If the market was say 10x bigger then one could do a lot by vertically integrating i.e. making your own avionics, perhaps making the engine too (which would mean buying an engine maker who has certified products, and then you get the engine for just the manufacturing cost which is probably about $5k).
Within a given country which is big enough, say the USA or more relevantly China, you can do a sub-ICAO operation and then making own avionics becomes easy; GA avionics are hardly rocket science if you just need to develop and make them.
I just don't think that somebody wanting to really cost-reduce a GA plane is going to go for a composite airframe, because one can easily massively cost-reduce a metal one (with expensive press tooling). The reason for going for composite is to make it pretty and reasonably aerodynamic while being able to make low volumes (e.g. Cirrus). It won't save money, ever.
Mmm, yes I've been down that route before, form pressing fuselage halves essentially.
I just thought the 8 minute manufacturing time for a composite part was pretty impressive. Most composite aircraft require substantial man hours of layup just like riveting ally, and hence the manufacturing process becomes very expensive even if the material is cheap as dirt.
Perhaps a reduction in cost for an SR22 would only be on the order of $50-100k in the end. 500k or 600k, who's counting... :)
