Victoria Edson
Digital twins are a boon but not a panacea, and when software hits the hardware of reality, the latter still can be bruising. Boeing’s T-7A Red Hawk advanced jet trainer made considerable and valuable use of digital engineering in design, but the programme has still seen real-world difficulties and delays.
The T-7A was touted as an early flag carrier for digital-engineering development, using a high-fidelity software model of the design to support and potentially compress the R&D process. Six years on from the contract award, the T-7A has already had at least two years of delay, so is the approach yet robust enough on its own? The T-7A experience is perhaps a cautionary tale regarding what can still go wrong irrespective of having the latest in digital capabilities.
Models and simulations have, of course, been used in engineering processes for decades, with the defence-aerospace industry adopting them to aid design decisions. Clicking on ‘run’ repeatedly has the advantage of not accruing the same cost and resource as an actual flight test by orders of magnitude.
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