Altitude Aerospace helped Bombardier solve crisis – Montreal Gazette

Orlando, Fla. Altitude Aerospace of Montreal can take some credit for helping to save Bombardier Inc.’s bacon when it had to scramble fast — and on the QT  to prevent a Chinese supplier from delaying its CSeries airliner.

Dimitri Gauthier-Arapoglou, director of marketing and business development for the 7-year-old engineering firm, said Altitude Aerospace came to the rescue by shedding 220 pounds- about 100 kilos from the combined weight of eight doors on the aircraft in development that is supposed to fly within the next two months.

The work had been done by China’s Shenyang Aircraft Corp., which was incapable of bringing the doors down to their nominal weight, a spec in the marching orders that suppliers are given by aircraft-makers.

Shenyang was supposed to supply the complete CSeries centre fuselage, which is not simply an empty tube, but a large and sophisticated component incorporating wiring, harnesses and other sub-assemblies. The finished section is a key part of the complex assembly process.

Aerospace consultant Richard Aboulafia of Teal Group in Fairfax, Va., long predicted that Shenyang was not up to the task, and that it would delay the CSeries. He has been proven half-right, so far.

Analysts who visited Bombardier’s facilities in China recently, however, believe Bombardier caught Shenyang’s lagging schedule early enough that it would not be the culprit causing a slip in the CSeries rollout.

In fact, said Gauthier-Arapoglou, Shenyang’s work package assignment was repatriated to Canada and Belfast three years ago.

Bombardier has consistently said publicly that Shenyang was up to the job, delivering fuselage section to its Q400 turboprops for many years, and that the first CSeries centre fuselage section Shenyang delivered to Montreal responded to all its criteria.

Gauthier-Arapoglou said that from the get-go, it was kind of a rock-and-roll ride at Shenyang. Bombardier sent out hundreds of its own engineers there from Montreal, but in the end, even that didn’t help. It had to come back here and at Short (in Belfast).

We had worked with Bombardier’s CL415 (water bomber) and their Challenger 850. We are renowned for our expertise in the conception of doors and exterior structural stress analysis, so we were already well-positioned. When the work migrated back here, they needed a section chief to oversee the structural stress analysis of their doors.

That chief turned out to be Altitude Aerospace’s Fadi Al-Ahmed, who Gauthier-Arapoglou called guru in that field.

Planes are, essentially, pressurized flying bombs, and doors are extremely complex and a huge safety component as are emergency exits, obviously. So you want to make sure that doors stay put.

French aerospace giant and aircraft-door specialist Groupe Latre moved a core of its own engineering team from China to Montreal, but Altitude Aerospace was the team leader on the whole door project plus our other engineers also worked on the cockpit and the aft (rear) fuselage. We had 16 of our engineers embedded with the Bombardier people.