At their facility in Broughton, UK, which produces wing spars for the A380 program, Airbus uses Mayfran pneumatic chip conveyors at the tool on their gantry mills to recover the 90% of material removed from aluminum slab in production of the spars.  This system has provided for outstanding uptime and improved quality by rapidly removing chips that could get caught by the tool, and significantly reducing the need for manual cleaning of the gantry bed during and after machining each part.

This solution was highlighted in Aerospace Manufacturing (June 2008) and Production Engineering (July 2008).  A summary of the application is also available.