Saint-Gobain, Aerospace Flight Structures Operation, located in Ravenna, Ohio, with corporate offices located in Wayne, New Jersey, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corporation (SGPPL), incorporated in California, with annual sales of $1 Billion worldwide. SGPPL is wholly owned by Companie de Saint-Gobain of Paris, France, with annual sales over $30 Billion. The Flight Structures plant in Ravenna is a self-contained Business consisting of Design, Engineering, Quality Assurance, Manufacturing and Customer Service with internal linking by various support organizations. The Company serves a broad, worldwide spectrum of the aviation industry, including commercial and regional airlines, aircargo carriers, as well as original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) of commercial, regional, business and military aircraft and aircraft Flight Structures.
The company's diversification, coupled with ever broadening product offerings, allows it to respond to the changing needs of its customers and the marketplace. Saint-Gobain Flight Structures is ideally and uniquely positioned as one of the few companies worldwide that cn offer a total solution of products, services and systems to the largest aerospace and airline companies in the industry.
Experience
Saint-Gobain has specialized in the design development and manufacture of high performance, high quality radomes for over 45 years, 35 years at the current location. We have fabricated large special mission radomes ranging in size from more than 18 feet long, 6 feet wide, 4 feet deep, and 250 lbs., down to a small hemisphere the size of a finger thimble weighing only 1/3 of an ounce. Saint-Gobain takes great pride in its knowledge and expertise in the complex art of electromagnetic window design and development and in the ability to manufacture a high quality product that complies with the customer’s specification and FAA regulatory requirements.
Saint-Gobain is one of the world's leading suppliers of radomes for virtually hundreds of different aircraft and air vehicles. These radome applications vary from private and light aircraft installations to large commercial aircraft. Saint-Gobain manufactures many radomes as an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). In addition, Saint-Gobain also currently manufactures nose radomes of its design for air transport, commuter, corporate, and general aviation aircraft. All of these radomes have received a Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) or Design Approval and Parts Manufacturing Approval (PMA) from the Federal Aviation Administration. We have obtained over 300 such radomes approved to date.
Saint-Gobain has worked on many special mission radomes. These special mission radomes are generally used with advanced radar systems for surveillance, hyper-spectral scanning, synthetic vision, live television, and satellite communication. By participating in these programs, Saint-Gobain has developed the analytical, engineering and production expertise required to design and build radomes with superior electromagnetic transmission capabilities.
Saint-Gobain has extensive experience in maintenance of radomes comes from repairing up to 1,000+ radomes per year over the last decade. These radomes are from all segments of the commercial and military markets, from almost all operators and manufacturers, both domestic and international. This quantity of repair and the types of damage observed provides an important experience database in understanding the reliability and maintainability of radomes from all different manufacturers. This service history provides feedback to design and manufacturing. This feedback determines the boundaries of the design concepts that provide acceptable performance, reliability and maintainability, and cost effectiveness.
Engineering
The Ravenna Engineering department has a staff of technical experts that develop, certify, and oversee the manufacture of radomes and composite structures, and assemblies. Each has at least 15 years experience in the aerospace industry. All but one has been in Ravenna for at least 10 years. While each person has a particular specialty (radome design, Finite Element Analysis, lightning protection, tooling, CATIA, certification, FAA regulations) all work freely with each other, and with the customer to achieve the end goal of a product development that meets performance requirements in a timely manner and on budget.