Development of Orbital Drilling for the Boeing 787

The new materials and material combinations such as composites and titanium combinations used on today's new airplanes are proving to be very challenging when drilling holes during manufacturing and assembly operations. Orbital hole drilling technology has shown a great deal of promise for generating burr free, high quality holes in hard metals and in composite materials. This paper will show some of the orbital drilling development work Boeing is doing with Novator to overcome the obstacles of drilling holes in a combination of both hard metals and composites. The paper will include a new portable orbital drilling system designed for these challenging applications as well as some test results achieved with this system.