PTC Solutions Help Hill Helicopters Take Flight
00:09 So, welcome to Hill Helicopters. I'm Jason Hill and I'm the owner and founder of the business. The immediate vision is a 335,000 square-foot factory, employing 500 people, making 500 helicopters a year. With a range of scalable technologies that allow us to make bigger and more sophisticated helicopters, and ultimately other types of aircraft as well. When you're designing an aircraft, you start with what you want the aircraft to be, what you want it to do. So, in our case,
00:40 I wanted the ability to take five 95 kilo passengers, three hours of fuel and fly at 140 knots. My name is Craig Jones. I'm Lead Mechanical Engineer here at Hill Helicopters. Jason knew what he wanted. He knew what the helicopter wanted to perform like, and he had the engine set in his mind. So from those almost very basic points, you can start to grow a design really. You can take those and you can start laying out the bones of the design.
01:12 So, you're all always trying to push the limits of what you can do. And then, tools like Mathcad really help quickly iterate designs and get to a point where you can start to scheme things up. Our CAD system, Creo linked up to Windchill, our PLM system, really gives us complete control over everything we do. We're building an organization to manufacture approved aircraft to the tightest standards on planet earth.
01:42 And that means that our business processes, our change-control processes, bills of materials, everything that goes into controlling what happens at every level of the business, is of vital importance to us. We've got so many things that have technical risk associated with them, and you want all of the things that you're building on to be solid. And what PTC and what Creo offers is a really robust, proven CAD system that we can rely on. And it's expandable. It'll grow with us. It's got all of the Windchill and the PLM facilities
02:14 that allow us to lock down all of the control that we need of our data, to go through all of the approvals that are along the road for us. You need your tools just to be there in your toolbox when you need them, and not to let you down. And that's really how we see Creo and PTC. Once we had more than two users, I said: "We've got to get Windchill in place, just to manage that CAD data." And it's just seamless, which is exactly what you want.
02:45 With all of these things it's vital that we keep the costs down. You find that the subscription model, rather than having to buy it outright, is a great help for people in our stage of development. There's a number of factors that go into making HX50 the way it is. So you start with the tadpole, because that's really efficient aerodynamically. And you put all the right bits in the right places and try and work out how to hide them. When I started, we were using a different CAD system. However, with my experience,
03:16 I knew that that CAD system wouldn't be able to handle the large, complex models that I knew we were going to produce for this product. So I made the recommendation to move to Creo. I know that Creo is excellent for use in large assemblies, as well as a great servicing tool, which we need here. It's also great at helping us to engineer the product, not just draw it up. We invested in some of the finest designers
03:48 that we possibly could have, with lots of automotive and supercar experience, to be able to bring a richness to the design. So, we've fused the workflows of automotive design and conventional aeronautical design to end up with a product that, not only works very well, it's very true to function. The difficulties of finding people means that when you find a good one, they might not necessarily have all the skills you need. So, the Creo LEARN platform allows us
04:19 to bring specialists in from all areas of engineering that meet our needs and to upskill them very quickly. And that's made a big difference to us. We have an in-house designer, Henry, who has designed all the A services on the helicopter. Everyone's delighted with those results. The way we bring that into an engineering world is through the advanced service tools in Creo. So we take the A service data and we can manipulate and turn it into some engineering data that we can actually use.
04:51 Having Ansys properly integrated inside Creo allows our design engineers to get closer to where the analysts need the design to be, where the fully optimized design is, before we spend the time and expense of big, sophisticated, high-fidelity models. And that too is an advantage. It gives the design engineers the ability to design with far more confidence than has been possible previously. The more simulation you can do at all stages of the design means that you need less testing
05:23 and you can bring your product to market quicker. Importantly, for us, it gives us a higher level of confidence that the expensive tests that we do, we pass. We're a new business. And we want to work in as modern a away as possible. What we are doing is using a lot of model-based definition in our design, and that will follow through from our account software and our CMM software. And it'll all tie it together. So, raw material comes in through one door. We add the maximum value here,
05:53 and a premium product goes out the other end. The transformation of the business over the last two years or so has been a dream come true for me. It's just been incredible. Marketing's never been simpler. Media's never been simpler. So, it's never been easier to do something bold like this. What it needs is the will and the drive, and then the skills and the platform to do it. PTC definitely provides a lot of the tools that you need to enable these kinds of things to happen easier and faster than ever before.