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Headline: AIMING HIGH Boeing's Phantom Works is an R&D haven for futuristic
ideas
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ST. LOUIS - Far from the problems of congested Puget Sound
assembly lines, St. Louis-based Phantom Works is creating a Boeing
future that looks a lot like science fiction.
Fighter planes without vertical tails, satellites that use the
sun's energy to change orbits, helicopters that transform into jet
fighters, aircraft that look like huge flying wings: These are just
a few of the futuristic concepts being developed, and sometimes
flown, by Boeing Phantom Works teams across the country.
David Swain, St. Louis-based executive vice president of Phantom
Works, is proud of the futuristic bent of his unit's work.
"We're working on what might be after Delta IV, what might be
after the space shuttle," he said, referring to two current space
craft. "We wanted an organization that by definition would be on the
leading edge of innovation."
Phantom Works, quietly acquired by The Boeing Co. as part of
McDonnell Douglas Corp., was the latter's center of research and
development.
A response to design successes of the former Lockheed-Martin's
famous Skunk Works, and purportedly also in response to McDonnell
Douglas' poor performance in the early competition for the F-22
fighter, Phantom Works was created to help the company's researchers
stretch their own technology envelope. It was named after McDonnell
Douglas F-4 Phantom, perhaps the most successful fighter the company
ever built.
Now Phantom Works has been incorporated into the new Boeing, and
has become an organization pushing the limits of technology and
design across the company.
A "virtual organization," it includes 4,500 of the company's top
engineers and scientists, most of them concentrated at five sites
across the country. In addition to St. Louis, the five include the
Seattle area, Southern California, Philadelphia and Mesa, Ariz.
Swan contends that mixing people from the old Boeing, as well as
the former Rockwell International and McDonnell Douglas, is proving
supportive of creative thinking.
"We're just beginning to understand the synergies of these
mergers," he said. "No matter where they're from, we have tons of
really brilliant people."
These experts typically work in small integrated teams, averaging
20 to 25 people, that can be rapidly mobilized to tackle a
particular innovation and then disbanded. Using the power of linked
real-time computer design systems, Boeing engineers can team up on
certain problems from widely scattered sites, quickly moving from
concept to reality. At any one time, Phantom Works teams are working
on upwards of 500 projects.
For instance, a Phantom Works team helped designed, produce and
then successfully test fly the prototype X-36 tailless fighter in
just 27 months, for $20 million. This government-sponsored program
may form the basis for a next generation of fighters even less
visible to enemy radar than the F-22.
"It's a tremendous asset for Boeing to have acquired," said Brett
Lambert, vice president of DSI International, a Washington,
D.C.-based consultant specializing in outer space. "It was one of
the diamonds in the rough of the acquisitions. It is just starting
to show results."
Phantom Works currently operates with an $800 million annual
budget, $600 million of that in U.S. government contracts, the
balance from Boeing, Swain said. One of Phantom Work's tasks is to
find ways to cut development and production costs while it advances
technology, reflecting the Defense Department's tighter budgets.
For instance, one Phantom Works team has been working to adapt
commercial avionics to military uses, to eliminate the costly need
to custom-design such equipment. A manufacturing process team is
developing ways to combine metal and composite components into large
one-piece parts, that are lighter and have few fasteners than
built-up parts.
One of Swain's goals is to cultivate an organization apart from
the bureaucratic maze of Boeing itself.
"How do we have a small group of people, who aren't caught up in
the day-to-day, who can be innovative and take some calculated
risks," he said. "We are chartered to be a little more risk-taking
and innovative."
Boeing analyst Paul Nisbet, president of JSA Research Inc. in
Rhode Island, said he believes Boeing does need to remove boundaries
to creative thinking if it is to remain on the leading edge.
"I think they will be very innovative. Phantom Works will be a
major determinate of where they're headed, certainly in terms of
state-of-the-art technology," Nisbet said.
While most of Phantom Work's research is tied directly to Boeing's
Information, Space and Defense Systems Group, the unit also is
establishing links with Boeing Commercial Airplane Group, Swain said.
"Our biggest charge is to get good ideas, prove them out, and then
transfer them into the regular business units," Swain said.
In New York, Prudential Securities analyst Nick Heymann approves
of Boeing's decision to incorporate Phantom Works into its
post-merger restructuring.
"Boeing is putting money down on several different alternatives,"
he said. "They are committed to the belief that space offers
tremendous growth."
The existence of Phantom Works also illustrates one fundamental
advantage Boeing has over European rival Airbus Industrie. While
Airbus has neared Boeing in commercial aircraft sales, and in some
ways has surpassed it in commercial aircraft innovation, the
European company is hampered by the fact that it has no defense or
space activities. |
