GKN Westland Now Boasts Six Plants in the U.S. for Business Jet Nacelles

Many years ago, GKN Westland Aerospace (GKN WAe) made a major business jet breakthrough by winning contracts from AlliedSignal (now Honeywell) to supply nacelles for the TFE731 turbofan, which powers the Dassault Falcon 50, and Galaxy Astra SPX.

Now the Isle of Wight, UK-based company is even busier, making nacelles for all Honeywell's new AS900-series engines that will power the Bombardier Continental business jet and three models of the Avro RJX.

GKN WAe read the early signs that the American public was disillusioned with turboprop regional airliners and quickly realised that its future lay in supplying new technologies to the fast growing regional jet and corporate markets.

Through acquisitions the company now has six high-tech manufacturing facilities in the U.S., employing a third of the company's total workforce of 6,000.

GKN WAe has become well known for its innovative technical engineering and new materials technology which are often cross-fed from within the Group's other research and development activities. For example, flap vanes for its MD-11 nacelles (the largest the company manufactures), were developed from helicopter rotor blade technology. The carbonfiber nacelles it supplies for the Dornier 328 turboprop use heat-resistant materials developed from a military helicopter infrared-suppression system.

Backed by parent GKN plc, GKN Westland Aerospace has been transformed from a solely UK-based, $100 million turnover company in 1997, to a global status first-tier supplier to the propulsion market of nacelles, engine components and transmission systems. Turnover to date has increased seven-fold.

GKN WAe's specialist Aerospace Composite Technologies (ACT) division this year opened a new $750,000 closed-circuit icing research wind tunnel (IRWT) at Luton Airport, UK. It is designed to simulate the effects of inflight icing conditions on aircraft structures and cockpit transparencies.

ACT says that IRWT is one of the few icing wind tunnels in the world that can produce ice crystals as well as supercooled liquid water droplets to simulate a wide spectrum of icing conditions in static air temperatures down to minus -30C, and at speeds up to Mach 0.62. Simulated snow and rain can also be created. Non-aircraft structures such as shipborne or rescue and safety components can also be tested there.

The company hires out the tunnel for testing other manufacturers' components, and offers a complete design, development, testing and certification capability. First external customer for the new facility was Sextant, which has contracted ACT to test several models of pitot probes.

ACT is believed also to be developing an electrothermal ice protection system (ETIPS) that could be applied to all types of new aircraft and helicopters. The simplicity of the system enables it to be engineered more easily around complex shaped structures-literally reaching parts that other de-icing systems cannot.