Taiwan’s Aero Industrial Development Corp. (AIDC) is bidding to achieve Tier 1 supplier status with the major aerospace OEMs. It is building the Taiwan Advanced Composites Center (TACC), a 538,000-sq-ft facility that will contain large new autoclaves, ply cutters and computer-controlled milling machines. AIDC already produces smaller composite parts, such as the co-cured frames for the cockpit of Sikorsky’s S-92 helicopter.
AIDC is best known for developing Taiwan’s Indigenous Defense Fighter (IDF), and producing 130 of them from 1987 to 2000. But the government-owned company has diversified significantly from military work in the past 15 years. It has developed significant aerospace capability across-the-board, from high-speed machining to harness testing, and from structure analysis to system integration. A separate engine manufacturing facility in Kangshan offers core capabilities such as vacuum precision casting and plasma spray coating.
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