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Heroux-Devtek recently completed assembly of the tallest landing gear on the market as it prepares for deliveries for the Boeing 777 and 777X airliner programs. Heroux-Devtek Photo
Heroux-Devtek marked a major milestone on June 1, completing assembly of the tallest landing gear on the market as it prepares for deliveries for the Boeing 777 and 777X airliner programs.
“The bigger the engine under the wings, the longer the legs you need,” said Gilles Labbé,president and chief executive officer, who, at six feet, three inches, is dwarfed by the towering six-wheeled bogies that reach almost 20 feet.
Under a build-to-print contract signed in 2013, Heroux Devtek will become the sole supplier of landing gear in 2017 for the massive turbofan 777 and its eventual replacement, the 777X, which is scheduled to take flight in 2020.
The deal, which runs through 2028 if all options are picked up, is the largest the Longueuil, Que.-based company has ever struck and makes Boeing Commercial Airplanes its biggest customer, supplanting the United States Department of Defense.
Boeing currently has a backlog of around 500 airplanes on the 777 programs, mostly 777-300ER, and says its production rate remains healthy. “We strongly expect this will be well over a 1,000 airplane program for us,” said Labbé.
Heroux-Devtek has been designing and building landing gear systems since the 1960s, including for the Apollo lunar module, and includes most major manufacturers among its customer base, including Airbus, Alenia Aermacchi, Leonardo-Finmeccanica (formerly Agusta Westland), Bell, Bombardier, Dassault, Embraer, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Sikorsky.
But integrating into the Boeing Triple Seven program, which has been delivering aircraft since the 1990s, presented some unique challenges and demanded an unprecedented level of investment.
“The challenge was to build the capacity and capability of the full systems in two years to be able to support the production rate,” said Labbé in an interview with Skies, equating the experience to the old western movie scenario of trying to jump from a horse onto a moving train that is about to reach a cliff and cross onto a narrow rail bridge. “You’d better get in before [the cliff edge].”
Since 2014, the company has invested over $100 million in new and existing facilities, including a new 20,000 square-foot final assembly plant in Everett, Wash., just five minutes from Boeing, to accommodate landing gear that is too tall to fit on a truck and under a highway overpass.
To meet production, Heroux-Devtek spent $50 million on a new 110,000 square foot machining centre in Cambridge, Ont. that will supply the “ultra large” parts, and expanded its Strongsville, Ohio facility from 50,000 to 100,000 square feet to handle surface treatment, finishing and painting, as well as subassembly. Machining of components is also being performed in facilities in Kitchener, Ont., Laval, Que., and Springfield, Ohio.
Such a large investment in North American production might seem to be swimming against the tide, as competitors find cheaper labour offshore. But Martin Brassard, chief operating officer, said the return on “jobs with lots of know-how,” pushing “technology to its maximum,” and making greater use of automation should help it to be competitive.
Locating the Cambridge facility within Ontario’s technology triangle has also allowed the company to capitalize on an emerging high-tech workforce well prepared for the sector, Labbé added. “We have an apprentice program to ease the transition from the school to our shop. We are pretty proud of the workforce we have there.”
Heroux-Devtek has had a lengthy relationship with Boeing Defense, Space and Security, building and repairing landing gear for a range of United States Air Force and Navy programs such as the KC-135, F-18 Hornet and P-8 Poseidon (it also repairs or provides the landing gear for the Lockheed Martin C-130 Hercules and P-3 Orion as well as the General Dynamics F-16 Falcon). Most recently, it was selected to provide the landing gear for the entire CH-47F Chinook helicopter line, including the new Canadian fleet of 15 aircraft.
But direct business with Boeing Commercial is more recent, Labbé explained, consisting mostly of short two-to three-year contracts. In 2011, however, the company signed an agreement to build the retract actuator for the 777, marking the first step in a longer-term relationship.
“Boeing somewhat tested us on quite a complicated component,” he said. “It is a big actuator that is used to pull the landing gear into the airplane or push it out. We were quite successful delivering this on schedule.”
With the first Triple Seven landing gear now assembled—on budget and about five weeks ahead of schedule, Labbé noted—Heroux-Devtek will gradually ramp up to meet a production rate of 84 per year.
It has been a fast and hectic 30 months since work on the project began, so the small celebration in Everett on June 1 was well deserved. But with the contract expected to push corporate revenue to around $500 million by 2019, the real work is only just beginning.
