B/CA Show News - NBAA 2007 Day 1 - (Page 120) N B A A 2 0 07 ON THE RECORD— John Wolf, CEO, Adam Aircraft Adam’s New Boss Tackles Production Moving a world-class research and development forward into a world- class production capability is a huge task. And that’s the challenge facing John Wolf, who took over last month as chairman and CEO of Adam Aircraft from founder Rick Adam. The former executive vp and production expert at McDonnell Douglas is charged with transforming the Adam A500 piston engined airplane and the A700 AdamJet VLJ from development programs to full production. Last May, Rick Adam told Show News this was proving to be a far greater task than he ever imagined. “Yes I have heard him say that,” Wolf told Show News. “I think many people who are entering this business for the first time discovered that. I have been through this process several times in the past and I would say that it’s probably more difficult than many people imagined it is.” Why is that? “It is an absolutely straightforward kind of process, but it is very meticulous. The first issue that you have to address to transition to production is a very stable engineering configuration.” In other words, the A700 must be FAA certified without restrictions when production begins to ensure that every one is built the same and none have to be reworked or modified on the line. “We must be able to reproduce it dependably and accurately every time. That is a step that often is overlooked in the rush to get certification, and we are going to make sure that we do not miss that step.” Wolf declines to predict when certification will be complete. “We are moving toward it,” he says, with a second conformal airplane joining the flight test program. “We are going into the process full steam ahead. By early next year we will be able to make a much finer prediction, but right now we know certification will be next year.” Adam Aircraft currently employs some 700 people who have been hand-building each “We have funding in place to get us through the A700 type certificate,” says Wolf. “We closed that in May. So we are confident that we have sufficient funding to get us to that point.” “But it cost far, far less to do that than one might imagine and certainly far less by orders of magnitude than what it would take to do it with large airplanes made out of aluminum. So the investment to do it is modest,” he says. “One reason that it is modest is that we are “We must be able to reproduce it dependably and accurately every time. That is a step that often is overlooked in the rush to get certification, and we are going to make sure that we do not miss that step.” —John Wolf, chairman and CEO, Adam Aircraft aircraft in a facility that was geared toward getting two types ready for certification. But it isn’t geared toward production. Today it will take 14 months to build an A700. Wolf aims to cut that to 14 weeks with new tooling, new best practices, and automation. For example, a new automated ply cutter cuts out accurate shapes in carbon fiber ply and places them for layup with laser accuracy, replacing a labor intensive process that was done by hand and probably never quite the same twice. “So we see huge improvements in both time and in man hours to do that kind of process,” said Wolf. Of course all this takes money, and cash won’t start flowing in until aircraft are delivered. doing it before we ramp up production as opposed to trying to do it while we are in production. I have had the experience of a production line that was producing more than 120 airplanes a year and at the same time we were trying to make these same changes in the process. Every airplane that was being produced was being produced so inefficiently that we were losing money in production while we were trying to invest in fixing production. That is a far more difficult and expensive process than simply getting it right before we ramp it up.” There are already provisions in place for further working capital as Adam goes through the initial ramp up after type certification, Wolf said. “We have confidence that funding will not be our constraint.” With the A500 already certified, that aircraft will lead the revamping of the manufacturing process. The line will be turned on late this year or early next and A500s will start rolling out at a maximum interim rate of three per month before the end of next year. The A500, Wolf said, is now in the final stages of certification. “All of the testing is now finished. It’s now in the hands of the FAA, and let’s just say it is absolutely imminent.” Getting to this point, Wolf allowed, has taken “far too long. It’s a lesson we’ve learned and are taking to heart in the A700. We want to make sure that we do this once as opposed to stringing it out over a very long time.” —John Morris Adam Aircraft is bringing both a new twinjet (the A700) and a new piston single (the A500) into production. 120 September 25, 2007 www.aviationweek.com/shownews http://www.aviationweek.com/shownews
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