In the beginning there was an altimeter - Meggitt PLC

At Meggitt’s Polymers & Composites plant in Rockmart, Georgia, USA, a workforce
dominated by women sculpts a very special kind of rubber into the whale-like
structures that constitute America’s market-leading flexible fuel tanks. Some are
lightweight, yet immensely strong bladders. Others—crashworthy and ballisticallyresistant—help
prevent death from fuel fires and enable military aircraft to get back to
base safely on a shot tank. That’s why Rockmart people don’t mind that the work is
tough, probably the toughest across Meggitt.
What changes with the seasons is the feel
of the rubberised fabric layers
Unless you work at the division’s sister facilities in Loughborough and Oregon creating
rubber seals to fill the gaps in aero-engines and airframes, you could be forgiven for
thinking a tool is a rivet gun, a soldering iron or even a CNC machine.
At Rockmart, a tool is the large wooden, steel or laminate structure from which
a plaster or cardboard mould of a fuel tank is made. In Meggitt’s seal factories, metal
presses and plaster moulds accommodate all manner of configurations but are
smaller-scale. Rockmart fuel tanks come in shapes and sizes as awkward and large as
sofas and grand pianos and, in some cases, small cars—fitting whatever cavity is left
for fuel after the aircraft designers have finished their work and filled the airframe with
gadgetry. When you make a rubber seal, you sit at your work (mostly). In Rockmart
you stand, using a turning fixture to manhandle a structure often bigger than you. To
Loughborough and Oregon instruments—knives, scrapers and scissors—Rockmart adds
sledges and grinders.
A Rockmart operator literally sniffs the air
and knows how to play the day’s work
And then there‘s the weather. Ever been to Georgia in August? Temperature—humidity—
is everything. The most experienced workers know what it takes to create these mammoth
bags come spring, summer, autumn, winter. Come rain or shine, they just know. What
changes with the seasons is the feel of the rubberised fabric layers that make up a tank and
their propensity to stick and stay. Rockmart craftsmen and women literally sniff the air
and know how to play the day’s work.
And that’s not all to the 726,000 square foot facility. When it was acquired in 2008
with what is now Meggitt Aircraft Braking Systems in Akron, Ohio, it came with a
significant electro-thermal ice protection and composites business. Today, this constitutes
around a quarter of the plant’s output from around a third of the plant’s 1000 or so workers.
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REVIEW | WINTER 2010