Fort Worth tech center may help Bell get helicopters, drones to the military faster
One of Fort Worth’s oldest and largest companies is taking steps to speed up its delivery of helicopters and unmanned aircraft to the military and other customers.
Bell Textron Inc., which employs about 4,200 people in North Texas and operates from a headquarters near the Fort Worth-Hurst border, on Thursday officially unveiled its new Manufacturing Technology Center. The tech center is at 5401 Sandshell Drive near Interstate 35W and Fossil Creek Boulevard in north Fort Worth, about a 20-minute drive from the company’s executive suites.
The company’s leadership team joined Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price and other dignitaries for a celebration of the new facility, which has about as much floor space — 140,000 square feet — as a supermarket. It’s meant to be a place where Bell’s engineers can take their freshly-designed aircraft components — everything from gear boxes to wings and rotor blades — and figure out how to mass produce them quickly and accurately.
Delays and cost overruns can occur when there are flaws in producing new parts, or when problems surface with parts fashioned from new metals or other materials for emerging aviation and defense technologies. The Manufacturing Technology Center is designed to prevent those problems by giving engineers and other workers a place to retool and refine their innovations before sending them out for mass production, said Glenn Isbell, Bell vice president of rapid prototyping and manufacturing innovation.
For example, Isbell said the company’s team working on the Bell V 280 Valor, a much-heralded tilt-rotor aircraft under development for the U.S. Army, believe they have found ways to dramatically lower the cost of parts such as helicopter masts — the vertical shafts connecting the rotor blades of a helicopter to the transmission.
“We took the V 280 mast, which has a lead time of a year to 18 months, and we were able to cut costs 40% and reduce the lead time by over 80%,” Isbell said. “We can monitor how a part is being built. The whole idea of having a batch of parts and finding out they’re all bad is what we’re trying to avoid.”
As mayor, Price has long advocated that the city lure more high-paying transportation and goods movement jobs.
“We intend for this region to be the heart of mobility innovation, and you all are at the front of that,” Price told Bell employees during a ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday. “For those of you who are working here, opportunities like this continue for you to grow your trade, to learn new skills and stay abreast of what’s happening. It’s exciting to see that happening.”
Isbell said the new tech center, which at a given time could house 60 to 80 Bell employees working on various projects, also will provide a place for the company to demonstrate its manufacturing plans to the military and its congressional overseers, and ease concerns about delays and cost overruns.
“We have to prove to them we can do it,” he said. “Disbelief is a natural tendency.”
Mitch Snyder, Bell president and chief executive officer, said it was “imperative” that the company build the tech center, to stay on top of changing technologies in aviation and air defense, and the use of newer composites and other materials.
“This space has an ultra modern look and feel that captures our pioneering spirit,” Snyder said. “There’s a combination of digital designs along with latest in manufacturing equipment.”
For now, the Manufacturing Technology Center is mostly an empty open space with bright white walls. A handful of machines have been installed, including a high-speed milling machine, an industrial-size freezer and a precision measuring machine for gears and hubs.
Many other large pieces of equipment will be installed during the next several months, as the tech center becomes fully operational.
In addition to building the V-280 Valor in a partnership with Lockheed Martin, Bell also is working on the 360 Invictus, a proposed helicopter design for the military’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft program. Those programs are likely to dominate the activity at the tech center in the short-term, officials said.
As drones and other unmanned aircraft become an even more prominent part of aviation and aero defense in the coming years, the design and manufacture of parts for those machines also likely will be closely connected to the tech center, officials said.
Bell officials haven’t disclosed a construction price for the tech center. The facility was built by refitting an existing building.
Bell didn’t receive any tax breaks for the expansion into north Fort Worth, although city officials helped with rezoning the property, said Robert Sturns, Fort Worth economic development director.
The tech center also will feature integrated computer software that will monitor and control Internet connections, cybersecurity and all movement of people and goods in the building.
Bell was founded by Lawrence Dale Bell in 1935, as Bell Aircraft Corp. in Buffalo, N.Y. He moved the company to northeast Fort Worth in 1951.
Today, Bell is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Textron Inc., a multi-industry company that also includes Cessna and Beechcraft airplanes, as well as E-Z-GO golf carts and Arctic Cat snowmobiles and many other products.
