Digital engineering has reached the aviation industry. Yesterday, February 23, Boeing announced the start of mass production of the T-7A Red Hawk training aircraft.
The aircraft, created jointly with the Swedish company Saab AB, in 2018 won the US Air Force tender under the T-X program. The long-term contract, which has a total value of $9.2 billion, includes 351 training aircraft, as well as 46 ground simulators.
Production of the T-7A Red Hawk
The T-7A Red Hawk was the first aircraft developed using the digital engineering method. In the future, the US Air Force intends to develop this direction and even allocated the designation " e " for aircraft developed using the method of digital engineering.
Presentation of eSeries-Implementation of digital engineering in military developments
Boeing points out that the use of digital engineering has improved the quality of the initial design by 75%. Build time was reduced by 80%, and software development and testing was reduced by 50%.