An expert, international team has designed, prototyped, and successfully tested a composite fuel tank access cover (FTAC) for the new Airbus A400M military aircraft.

An expert, international team, assembled and project managed by Brookhouse, of Darwen, has designed, prototyped, and successfully tested a composite fuel tank access cover (FTAC) for the new Airbus A400M military aircraft and is soon to start rate manufacture. The various members of the team have brought to the project, skills in composites components design, materials technology, process tooling and composites manufacture, to ensure that the innovative finished product totally complies with the Airbus specification, especially in terms of its light weight, its damage resistance and cost-effectiveness. Brookhouse has itself worked closely with Airbus and bae systems for many years on projects from the Canberra bomber to the JSF and on various aircraft within the Airbus series.

However, in order to win the contract for the design and manufacture of the Fuel Tank Access Cover for the next generation of composite wings for the A400M, the Darwen company brought together a team comprising Sener, a Spanish company, who have an expertise in aeronautical design composites structures, Cytec, a US-based carbon fibre company, and Degussa, who manufacture a leading brand of core material for composite structures.

This team then designed, built and tested prototype models prior to the contract award to demonstrate that they had in principle a design that that could fulfil the stringent A400M design requirements.

All pre-production tooling required to support this task was manufactured by Brookhouse Tooling.

The qualification programme is now well advanced with the delivery of the production Fuel Tank Accces Covers scheduled to be in the last quarter of this year, in line with the schedule requirements.

The effective handling and efficient completion of this exciting project is a demonstration of Brookhouse's ability to offer a comprehensive, design/ make packaged composite product.

Acting as overall project manager, Brookhouse can supply aerospace companies with the capability to take responsibility and assume the risk for complete packages of composites development and manufacture work.

Working with global partners, it can develop the materials and techniques to design, manufacture and test prototype composite components and it can then design and manufacture the required production tooling before producing the finished components in-house.

As a result, Brookhouse is ideally placed to help aircraft manufacturers meet the challenges and opportunities afforded by composites components and structures.