Business View Magazine | January 2020

77 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JANUARY 2020 A IM AEROSPACE , INC . structure to jet engines. “We got to put carbon fiber components on the engine of the Boeing 777 and 787 aircrafts, and on the engine structures, also called nacelles, of the Airbus A350 engine,” he notes. (A nacelle is a housing, separate from the fuselage that holds engines, fuel, or equipment on an aircraft.) “In the case of the 777 and the 787, we won contracts for carbon fiber components that were already being manufactured by the incumbent supplier, but we’ve been able, through our process technology, to provide a more compatible solution for our customer. In the case of the Airbus A350, the parts that we now provide for the nacelles used to be metallic, and we’ve been able to work with our customer to help them with the redesign of these metallic parts into carbon fiber and then, with a carbon fiber solution, it significantly reduced the weight of the structure. So, these will all be new planes built going forward; they are not retrofitted planes.” “We’ve also grown our company by more than 100 employees, already this year,” Cagnatel adds. “Most importantly, though, we did hire an industry 4.0 team, and we put in place the first apps towards industry 4.0 digitalization, which, by the way, was directly linked to us winning those contracts for the jet engine components. While doing this, we have moved our research and development facility from California into our HQ in Renton, Washington, and moved the Industry 4.0 team, the automation team, as well as R&D for thermoplastic composites up here to be much closer to home and integrated with the rest of the team. We invested heavily in Washington; we completely refurbished one of our facilities where we make the environmental control system ducting for the Boeing aircraft, and we invested in automated machinery to help reduce all of the health and safety risks and to improve the utilization of our materials while reducing our impact on the environment.” Perhaps the biggest, and most up-to-date, 1227 Corporate Drive West, Arlington, TX 76006 (817) 640-1300 www.ascintl.com Supplier of aerospace fasteners, fittings and hardware to customers worldwide. Dependable Service for the Aerospace Industry Since 1951