The Manufacturer team were privileged to be recently shown around the HQ of Leonardo, the home of British helicopters. During the site visit we caught up with the company’s Chief Engineer for UK Military Aircraft, Mike Overd
The first, and perhaps most important thing that The Manufacturer team learned during our whistle stop tour of Leonardo’s Yeovil site, is just how difficult designing and manufacturing helicopters actually is.
The variables involved and the nuances in design, physics and aerodynamics make rotorcraft far more complicated and complex than fixed-wing design. Mike joked: “Fixed wing engineers have an easy job by comparison”. Aerodynamically it’s very challenging and there are a plethora of different phenomena that are difficult to solve mathematically, all of which can change dynamically in a matter of seconds. This all adds up to there being some seriously talented engineers at Leonardo.
How challenging is rotorcraft?
MO: The helicopter is an unbelievably complicated product, with non-linear problems when it comes to structural dynamics, aerodynamics, control systems etc. They are phenomenally difficult to engineer, and the requirements for component design stretch our materials to the very limits of their capabilities.
One of the main difficulties is to maintain the structural integrity of the components and the consistency of manufacture, in order that the 100th part we manufacture is just as good as the first one we tested. I once went to a fatigue conference in Seattle, where an aeroplane manufacturer stated that they had tested their 757 fuselage to 120,000 cycles, thereby clearing it for 30 years of service; 120,000 cycles for us is just nine hours.
In rotorcraft we’re working at very high frequencies; as the blades are spinning, they’re accumulating very high loads at 3.5Hz, so it doesn’t take long to get up towards a million cycles, and it really exercises all of the component design to the extreme limits of what the materials can take.
However, it’s a fascinating product and carries the engineering fascination that has occupied some of us for our entire working lives – and still throws up challenges and difficulties on a daily basis. Nearly everything on a helicopter is more difficult than it would be on any other product.
We are one of few manufacturers in the world, and the only one in the UK, with the capability to design, develop, test, manufacture, support, and deliver training for rotary wing aircraft. Our end-to-end capability means everything is covered; from rotor design and the resin used on rotor blades, right through to pilot training and test flights.
This means the design team are never too far away from the flight test team, and the manufacturing team. Therefore, lines of communication are very short, enabling smoother iterations and changes that are required. This is vital as we are constantly looking at how well our components operate in service and whether the design needs to change.
End-to-end support means we understand how the vehicle behaves in service and we can rapidly update its capabilities in line with a customer’s developing requirements – it’s an integrated solution. If you look at the typical life of a helicopter, it’s 30-50 years. The idea that the aircraft you delivered 50 years ago is meeting today’s needs, however, doesn’t bear scrutiny.
Therefore, customers will need the OEM to provide midlife updates, solve obsolescence, improve reliability, change mission software, add new sensors etc. We can analyse what’s going on in service, change the design, substantiate that design in our test labs, manufacture the part and deliver the service modification that introduces it.
What does digital transformation look like for Leonardo?
We have done a lot of work in the digital space for a number of years. We have extremely good capabilities when it comes to our simulation facility and we have a world class capacity for simulating the behaviour of helicopters. That said, there is more we can do. At the moment, we’ve got top-level flight simulation, but with levels of fidelity that we would like to see spreading down into all of our subsystems, so that we have a true model-based systems engineering basis for some of our future developments.
We have recently won an award for process innovation for the work we’ve done on simulating the behaviour of our aircraft in the ship air wake environment, looking at how easy it is to land rotorcraft on ships. That’s encouraging, but we’ve got more to do.
How have the challenges of recent years been dealt with and does the company look different as a result?
COVID was an enormous challenge. The moment we had the instruction to work from home, the IT department went into overdrive. And within three weeks, I had my entire engineering team working from home, enabled by different ICT solutions.
We very rapidly got used to doing all of our business through online meetings rather than face-to-face. And throughout the whole COVID period, we still managed to discharge all of our responsibilities as an engineering directorate, which was tremendous. I do have a concern that the development of our younger staff or new starters in the business may have suffered as a result of a lack of face-to-face contact, and that’s something that we’re having a close look at now we’re starting to emerge from the pandemic.
Brexit is another concern. As an engineering directorate we work cross-geographically, and for many years we enjoyed freedom of movement. We’re now having to think more carefully about that as a result of the requirement to have visas etc. So, we’re having to be more scrupulous about the need for travel, and have more forethought around who needs to move around.
Is Leonardo experiencing issues around skills and attracting young and diverse people into the business?
Because the skills required in helicopters are so unique they’re not taught in academia, and there is very little rotorcraft specific content in any UK design engineering degrees. This is mainly due to the fact that the analytical tools and the corporate knowledge only exist in industry and that expertise is part of our core IP.
We are looking to expand the work we do with universities to get amongst the material that they teach. But there aren’t many academics out there that have actually worked in rotorcraft. So the universities that have the teaching ability in the field is actually quite limited.
We traditionally got the skills we needed by recruiting graduates and conducting on the job training, but therein lies the issue; not just for us but for industry in general. People like me, who have worked all our lives at the same company, are rarer and rarer; there’s a societal pressure whereby people are more inclined to want to move jobs and have different experiences. However, with something as complex as helicopters, the skills required can take decades to develop in an individual, so it’s a real challenge – to capture the corporate knowledge we have and make it accessible to the next generation.
As Head of the Design Organisation, I have to ensure that the business has the knowledge necessary to hold the certifications that we’ve got. But how do I ensure the next generation has that knowledge at their fingertips? It’s quite a conundrum, and most aerospace companies would probably tell you they’re facing the same sorts of challenges.
Not only does the proficiency in core rotorcraft specific disciplines take years to acquire, once lost, they can’t be recovered. Many of the skills that we have were developed in the 1950s and 1960s, when there was plenty of research money and a lot of experimentation going on. I don’t see any nation having the appetite to fund that sort of work unilaterally in the future.
There have been several independent reviews that have looked at the design problem around helicopters and have concluded that approximately 85 to 89 skills are required to design a rotorcraft; skills which can’t be developed overnight. This equates to a minimum of around 400 engineers.
We’ve been challenged as to why we regard engine integration, for example, as an applied skill, meaning that some rotorcraft experience is required. We’ve had it suggested that actually, it’s a generic skill, and we could bring in somebody from a fixed wing background who could hit the ground running. Our response was to ask how many fixed wing aircraft fly sideways? So actually, that integration problem in rotorcraft is an illustration of the unique nature of some of the problems involved. We’re fortunate as we are currently on a recruitment drive.
We have leave to increase the engineering team in Yeovil to over 500 engineers, so are looking to bring new people into the business, and we’ve got a really good track record of training young people. We’ve taken in graduates and undergraduates on industrial placements. We have a strong apprenticeship scheme, and we support graduate apprentices. So our normal policy is to develop our own in-house talent and we’re really strong at doing that; we’ve got a very good developing engineers programme that’s been accredited by the engineering institutions that guide people through to chartership. From a skills perspective, we’re in pretty good position.
The diversity issue is more a societal question. It’s a problem that the whole sector has. I would certainly like to see an improved gender balance in my engineering directorate. And to that end we are working with STEM Returners to give opportunities to people that may have had a career break, for example to have children, and bring them back into the workplace.
How has the pace of technological change impacted helicopters?
The pace of change has undoubtedly accelerated, and we’re seeing all sorts of new challenges. We’ve got new entrants in the market, particularly around urban air mobility and electric drive multi-rotor solutions. That’s obviously causing us to think about what configurations of helicopters we’re going to be looking to engineer in the future.
We’re also looking at uncrewed helicopters as a potential area to focus on. The direction of travel in the US is to look at fast rotorcraft; different configurations that can travel quicker, whether that be compounding solutions or tilt rotors. And we’re looking at those potential solution sets with some interest. Some of that, obviously, is in the hands of what our customers want. So we’re working with them to understand what capability advantages and disadvantages they would have from alternative solutions and to work with them to deliver those in the future.
Mike Overd, Chief Engineer of military aircraft UK at Leonardo Helicopters. Mike was also featured on a recent episode of The Manufacturer Podcast. Mike is responsible for the achievement of technical and programme milestones across the whole of the engineering organisation for UK military programmes. He is also Head of the UK Design Organisation with airworthiness signature on behalf of the UK Board.
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• Rotorcraft design is unbelievably complex
• Leonardo offers end-to-end capability at its Yeovil site; from rotor blade design to pilot training and test flights
• Rotorcraft skills are so unique they are not taught within academia
• Future trends in the sector look set to be around urban air mobility, electric drive multi-rotor solutions and uncrewed aircraft
• Leonardo have around 500 highly skilled engineers at its Yeovil HQ
