GKN Aerospace Opens New Composite Design & Engineering Centre

GKN Aerospace has announced that it has opened a new composite design engineering centre at its Advanced Composite Structures facility in Alabama.

GKN Aerospace officials were joined by Alabama Governor Robert Bentley and state economic development leaders for the announcement which was made at the Farnborough International Air Show.

The company will use the new centre at the Tallassee facility to extend its global engineering, providing additional expertise in the design and build of major composite structures and assemblies for aircraft and helicopter new customer programs.

The centre expands the established design for manufacturing operation at the Composites facility. Working with customers such as HondaJet, Bell Helicopter, and Airbus, the Alabama operation has achieved improvements in manufacturing speed, reliability and cost for critical structures on a variety of aircraft programs.

Daniele Cagnatel, Chief Executive Officer, GKN Aerospace in North America said;

Our new composites design engineering centre enables a vital expansion of the design/development engineering support we provide to our customers, significantly increasing the number of highly skilled engineering personnel based at our growing Alabama facility.

Work at the new centre in Elmore County will initially focus on design and development of advanced composite technologies for rotorcraft. Over the next 2 – 3 years the centre intends to increase its workforce of design and analysis engineers with recruits being drawn from the existing GKN Aerospace engineering team and through recruitment both locally and nationally across the USA.