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Bringing UAVs to life

Perhaps no technological development of the last 20 years has changed the nature of warfare as profoundly as the rise of the unmanned aerial vehicle.

Gone are the days when an aircraft’s persistence over a target is limited by the pilot’s endurance, or when an enemy soldier or insurgent can feel safe from harm if he doesn’t hear jet engines or see contrails overhead.

UAVs can loiter over a target —unheard and unseen — for 24 or more hours, waiting for the precise moment to deliver a Hellfire missile or guided bomb onto an unsuspecting enemy.

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems stands at the center of this revolution. When Defense Secretary Robert Gates talks about the importance of UAVs to the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, he is speaking first and foremost about General Atomics’ MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper.

Air Force Times got a rare opportunity to see Predators, Reapers and Army MQ-1C Sky Warriors take shape at the General Atomics production facility in a nondescript San Diego office park.

It takes 23 weeks to build a Predator, 32 to make a Reaper. And the tour of the factory shows a marvel of American ingenuity and transformation in all of those days.

Stronger than steel

Calling Predators and Reapers drones rubs Christopher Ames, director of business development for the aircraft systems group, the wrong way.

“Look at it,” he says, eyeing the graceful silhouette of a nearly completed Reaper. “It’s an airplane.”

Ames, a retired Navy rear admiral and fighter pilot, relishes the word as only an aviator can.

Those airplanes enter the General Atomics factory — which covers nearly three acres — as unassuming rolls of black carbon-fiber or graphite fabrics impregnated with epoxy resin. These fabrics will eventually become composites as strong as aluminum but substantially lighter.

Heat causes the resin in the fabric to cure and harden, explains Frank Belknap, the company’s director of composite manufacturing, so the raw fabrics are stored at zero degrees Fahrenheit.

The fabrics are not just any fabrics, we noted as Belknap tugged on a thin strip of black fabric to demonstrate its strength.

“That’s got about 30 times the strength of steel,” he said.

“If you can break that, I’ll buy you lunch.”

But its strength is only in one direction. If you pull it the other way, it frays as easily as if you were tearing a piece of paper.

Down a hallway from the freezer, the fabrics are laid flat on an automated cutting machine adapted from the garment industry. “We try to pull things out of different industries,” Belknap said.

The machine’s cutting arm moves across the surface of the fabric, using patterns stored in its computer to cut and label pieces of fabric to later be assembled into aircraft parts. The machine cuts about 35,000 parts per month.

Workers next place the precision-cut parts in layers that will become wing skins or structural members such as wing spars and landing gear. They start with a plastic or metal mold — costing $80,000 to $100,000 each — that gives the fabric pieces the shape of the part they will become.

A laser system mounted to the room’s high ceiling projects a pattern onto a wing mold, and workers lay the fabric pieces along the laser lines, building the wing skins up like plywood.

Before the laser projection was available, building the wings could have taken a week. Now, it takes 12 hours.

“The beauty of [it] is we can bring in people that have a good work ethic who had a composite background and they can pick this up very quickly,” Belknap said. “You don’t even need to be able to read a drawing.”

The different types of fabrics are combined and laid out in specific ways. Layering a fabric that is strong in one direction, for instance, can cancel out another fabric’s weakness in that same direction.

That is the key to building strong composites from such lightweight materials, Belknap says.

The manufacturing process also uses spacers between plies of fabric to give the materials additional strength, such as a light cardboard-like material with a honeycomb pattern. That makes the composite stronger but not substantially heavier.

Belknap likens the concept to a deck of playing cards.

“If you had two playing cards, they would bend,” he said. “But if you put the whole deck of playing cards together, it’s very stiff.”

The fabric pieces are laid into the mold and cured in a 250-degree oven, which triggers a chemical reaction in the epoxy resin that permanently bonds the fabrics together and hardens them in the shape of the mold.

“It generates its own energy,” Belknap said of the chemical reaction. “It then creates what you call a thermal set plastic. It hardens.”

Next, the parts are trimmed to their exact specified shape, either by hand or with a robot that cuts with a water stream exerting 55,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. That’s enough to cut through stainless steel two inches thick.

The robot is used mainly for parts that demand extreme precision, such as the hinges that attach flaps to wings.

Full of fuselages

The assembly floor is a large open space marked with signs announcing what aircraft and components are being assembled where: Predator B upper fuselage assembly; Predator lower fuselage assembly; and so on.

The space is nearly filled with fuselages and wings in different stages of assembly.

To assemble a fuselage, workers turn an upper fuselage skin upside down on a rack and lock in bulkheads . They then attach the lower skin to complete the fuselage.

To build a wing, workers mount the composite wing spars into a wing skin and then secure the other skin.

After the components are assembled, they are moved next door to the paint shop, where they are sanded, primed and painted the Air Force’s signature shade of gray. The painting process was adapted from the automotive industry.

From there, the painted components move to the integration floor, the final step in the production process. There, the wings are secured to the fuselages, engines installed in their housings and electronics and avionics added.

Once an aircraft is completed, it is crated and shipped to the company’s flight-test sites in the Mojave desert. The wings come off, allowing an aircraft to be shipped for testing — and eventually for deployment — in a single crate that fits easily into a C-130.

Belknap noted that the factory is running at 60 percent or 65 percent of capacity and could be ramped up if the company needs to fill more orders.