Page 4 - May 20 TNT

Editor’s Briefing by Rebecca Groom Jacobs GA Assembles CToronavirus Aid he general aviation industry has long served as a lifeline to people and communities in crisis. Previously, that spirit of service predominantly showed itself during natural disaster relief missions. But today, faced with the novel coronavirus crisis, aviation leaders and businesses have been quick to step up once again. Some of the biggest examples can be found in the manufacturing effort. As it became apparent the healthcare industry faced an extreme shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) supplies, several general aviation manufacturers joined the coalition across the country to engineer and produce custom components. I reached out to a few of the manufacturers to gather more specifics about their efforts: Cirrus Aircraft – “We started by looking at what actions we could take to help immediately – with basic personal protection equipment (PPE) supplies. Our first round of donations, including gloves, hand sanitizer and lab gear was dropped off to local hospitals in Duluth. We also put our production and product development teams to work building real solutions for one of the most urgent problems facing the medical community – face masks and respirators. Our experimental team has since assembled 31,500 face shields for the local medical community. Of even greater need are Powered Air Purifying Respirators (PAPR) – battery-powered blowers that provide positive airf low through a filter to a hood that protects healthcare workers from contaminated air. Our team, along with local partner Frost River Trading, quickly got to work prototyping equipment to meet this need, with 850 hood and coupler assemblies. And at the heart of creating full PAPR units, is a project to recreate the blower units available at area hospitals, which are in short supply. Our engineers have designed, prototyped and tested a replacement assembly using computer aided design (CAD) software as well as 3D printing. The design our team came up with costs a fraction of the typical unit supplied to hospitals.” Piper Aircraft – “At the end of March, Piper designed a prototype face shield with off-the shelf materials. With approval of the prototype, the team set out to source the necessary materials from wholesale suppliers and create a manufacturing line within the Piper factory. While the initial goal was to make a few thousand face shields for our local hospital, the demand quickly grew from 2,000 to 50,000, and today, we have orders for over 100,000 face shields with 34,000 already delivered throughout the United States. Additionally, our local hospital requested our support in making intubation boxes for COVID patients. We were able to design, build and de- liver the boxes within three days. Beyond the face shields and intubation boxes, our interior shop produced face masks for every employee to help protect them while working. We sourced fabric from the local Joanne’s Fabric store, which opened their doors just for us so that we could make enough face masks for 1,000 employees.” Textron Aviation – “While goggles, masks, gowns and gloves are critical personal protective equipment (PPE) for medical providers, plastic face shields are also used in addition to these items to protect the entire face. Textron Aviation is col- laborating with Wichita State University (WSU) to manufacture face shields from optically-clear PET film. First, WSU and Textron Aviation tested and adapted the open source design, then the Process Engineering team be- gan production using the com- pany’s large Gerber cutter. In response to the new CDC recommendation that people wear cloth or fabric face cov- erings when entering public spaces, the company is also APPAREO SYSTEMS PIPER AIRCRAFT TEXTRON AVIATION 2 • TWIN & TURBINE / May 2020