Safran Landing Systems has cut inspection cycle times on its coordinate measuring machines by 50 percent after switching to a REVO 5-axis scanning head from Renishaw, run through Metrolog measurement software from Metrologic Group, at its plant in Mirabel, Canada. The facility manufactures landing gear boxes for medium and large commercial aircraft, and the 50 percent figure matches the target Safran set for itself at the start of the project.
Landing gear boxes are a difficult inspection target. Large dimensions, distortion introduced during hardening, and deep cylinders set at complex orientations make measurement with conventional indexable probe heads slow going. Each part carries a high number of tolerances to verify, which multiplies measurement volume and stretches cycle times on the CMM floor. Safran's teams identified the opportunity while separately moving one of their machining processes to 5-axis strategies and applied the same thinking to inspection.
What's new here is less the raw speed gain than what it unlocks downstream. Fewer machine set-ups and CMM operator interventions free up capacity on the production floor. Parts get assessed and cleared for the next production stage faster, and the Material Review Board receives non-conformity data sooner when a part fails tolerance. Programming and analysis times also dropped enough that Safran was able to reallocate operational, support, and programming staff elsewhere.
Safran has now completed migrating its entire part portfolio to REVO 5-axis scanning, consolidating the cycle-time gains across all production rather than a single pilot line. The company describes the shift as delivering the reduction "without compromising repeatability on complex geometries," a claim that matters given how much of the savings depend on scanning replacing multiple indexable-head repositions per part. Metrologic Group, which supplies the Metrolog software running the inspection routines, published the results as a customer case study rather than releasing new hardware or software of its own.
