Boeing Floor Drilling Gantry System

The Floor Drilling Gantry System was originally designed, and built as a system to replace existing Automated Floor Drilling Equipment (AFDE) for the Boeing 747 aircraft. This new system incorporates features of a moving line process flow by combining the floor build verification, alignment, drilling, fitting installation, deburr, and work hardening processes into one line.

This new process:
• Eliminates the need for five (5) AFDE machines that drill floor grids inside of the fuselage. These machines were due for replacement thus affecting a cost savings as the Floor Drilling Gantry System costs less than the replacement cost of the 5 machines it replaced.
• Increases machine utilization as 747 floor assemblies are now processed through the floor drilling gantry system, rather than have machines positioned at several dedicated locations dependant on the floor section being drilled.
• Moves the drilling process out of the fuselage resulting in a flow time reduction as well as eliminating the requirement to clean chips out of the fuselage structure.
• Eliminates hard tooling used to locate fittings. This results in a cost savings.
• Eliminates manual labor processes, as all freighter fitting hard point locations in the past had to be located by fixed tooling and drilled by hand. Now these locations are determined by an automated probe routine and drilled by the system.