Piedmont leads the way

The Italian region of Piedmont is home to an important aerospace sector. Piedmont Aerospace District's president, Prof Mario Calderini, examines the cluster's key challenge in promoting its

members' manufacturing services.
The Italian aerospace industry plays a major role in promoting the country's manufacturing sector. Mainly concentrated in the area surrounding the Piedmont region's capital, Turin, a collection of international companies have grown a supply chain of valuable SMEs that provide technical and manufacturing services for the development of aircraft, aero engines, propellers, satellites and onboard avionics control systems.

With the first aero engine development in 1908 and the first flying prototype in 1909, the Italian aerospace industry was born in Piedmont. The cluster now accounts for 25% of Italy's aerospace sector. However, to compete against the kinds of knowledge and technology on offer from the competition requires organised and structured cooperation between academia, R&D, companies and institutions if the region is to overcome the challenges of innovation complexity and the globalisation dynamics of low cost countries that negate any cost-based advantages.

To do that, the regional government has set up the Piedmont Aerospace District to coordinate public institution involved in supporting the sector, as well as to gather the input from all the regional aerospace stakeholders. The outcome is a jointly developed R&D technology platform on which the regional funding has been focused, enabling more than €51 million of R&D spend on three strategic research projects involving large companies, SMEs and academia.

The first project of the regional aerospace technology platform, SMAT F1, is devoted to the development of UAVs for civil monitoring purposes and has already registered a European record making three different UAVs (Alenia Sky-X, Selex Galileo Falco and Nimbus C-Fly) flying in civil airspace. The second project, GREAT 2020, is developing new technology solutions to match the 2020 European emission standard ranging from Ti-Al component implementation to new engine architectures. Finally, Piedmont's space specialists are working on landing and rovering technologies for Mars and Moon exploration through the STEPS project.

The District, together with the Regional Government is working on the second phase of technology platform support devoted to critical technology development projects that will enable €30 million of R&D spending.

Piedmont has a strong tradition in system and subsystem integration. The District is working on aircraft programme production for both the Eurofighter Typhoon and Lockheed JSF F-35, aircraft MRO on the Eurofighter Typhoon, Tornado MLU and AMX ACOL, aircraft engine programmes that comprise the General Electric GEnx and Europrop TP400, space programmes including IXV, Expert and Exomars, and finally, UAVs, including Sky-X, Sky-Y, nEUROn and the smaller C-Fly and D-Fly.

And regarding the kinds of technological capabilities the Piedmont region can offer aerospace OEMs, its strength is based on the presence of seven large companies, including the Finmeccanica Group's Alenia Aeronautica, Selex Galileo, Thales Alenia Space and Avio, Aviospace, Mecaer and Microtecnica. These prestige companies lead a supply chain of more than 200 SME companies with high quality international standard compliance at competitive prices and with a strong cooperation with academic research centres like the Polytechnic of Turin.

For the cluster to respond to the challenges taking place in the industry, we are working on technology innovation support through the regional technology platform funding, as well as on empowering our supply chain via the internationalisation actions promoted by our local chamber of commerce. This is a specific Torino Piemonte Aerospace project that enables our SMEs to expand their network abroad and also through the business networking opportunities presented by the Aerospace & Defence Meetings Torino business convention.

www.torinopiemonteaerospace.com

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