Airborne

Airborne has spent more than thirty years in composites, and the shape of the business has changed twice in that time. It began as a maker of composite parts. It became a supplier of automation systems that other manufacturers use to make their own parts. Today it does both from The Hague, with a second site at Membury Airfield in West Berkshire, and it sells into aerospace, mobility, marine and what it calls big science, the large research instruments built for physics and astronomy. The European Investment Bank put 16 million euros behind the company in 2022 to fund that automation work. The mix is unusual for a firm of this size. Most composites specialists pick a lane, either making parts or selling equipment, and Airborne argues that knowing how a laminate actually behaves on a shop floor is what makes its machines work for other people.

The automation line addresses the early stages of composite production, where material is expensive and mistakes are hard to see until much later. Kit by Light handles the cutting room, converting rolls of material into sequenced kits under digital control so operators lay up the right ply in the right order with less waste. Automated Ply Placement turns that material into tailored laminates and preforms, coping with multi-material stacks, freeform shapes and variable thickness in prepreg, dry fibre or thermoplastic. Automated Edge Sealing solves the awkward job of protecting a carbon part after trimming, applying resin precisely with little programming effort. A robotised laminating cell combines tape laying, cutting and ply placement into one machine that produces net-shape blanks. Underneath sits a Data Insights software suite that feeds process data into existing ERP and MES systems. Lockheed Martin signed up to work with Airborne on next-generation composites automation, and the Spanish research centre FIDAMC has taken a similar route.

The manufacturing side is quieter and more specialised. Airborne is the European market leader in solar array substrate panels, the ultra-stiff sandwich structures that carry the cells on a satellite wing, and it has delivered more than 300 of them. Recent work includes the extra-large panels for the solar array of the European Space Agency's JUICE mission to Jupiter, supplied through Airbus Defence and Space Netherlands, panels for Galileo navigation satellites, substrates for the MDA Aurora constellation and structures for Jason-CS. Launcher work has followed, including grid structures and industrialisation support for small launch vehicles. The plant holds AS9100 approval and runs cleanroom and autoclave facilities, with structural design and analysis kept in house so the company can take a part from concept through qualification. Solar array substrates are an unglamorous product with an unforgiving specification, because a panel that warps by a fraction of a millimetre in orbit costs a satellite operator power for the life of the spacecraft.