Hanneke Weitering is a writer and editor with AIN covering advanced air mobility and new flight technologies. She became an aviation journalist and joined the AIN team in the summer of 2022 after reporting on spaceflight and astronomy for six years at Space.com. After earning a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, she moved to New York City to pursue a master’s degree in science, health, and environmental reporting at New York University&#039;s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She is now based in Seattle near Boeing Field and spends her free time exploring nature in the Pacific Northwest.

Science & Technology Editor

Hanneke Weitering

As more aerospace companies adopt digital twins to streamline engineering and manufacturing processes, the benefits of the technology have grown increasingly evident: significantly lower production costs and faster, more efficient workflows.
Digital twins, which fuse reality with digital models and simulations, can help companies optimize every stage of the product development cycle, from engineering through scaled manufacturing, operations, and even maintenance.
Siemens, which has helped numerous aerospace OEMs to modernize their processes with digital twins, has seen customers cut their manufacturing costs in half, according to Todd Tuthill, vice president for aerospace, defense, and marine industry at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Tuthill told AIN that major aerospace and defense primes using Siemens’ digital twins for aircraft development have reduced engineering rework costs from 20% to about 1%.
With the help of Siemens and its Xcelerator software suite, California start-up JetZero believes it can get a 250-passenger blended-wing-body airliner certified and in service in just five years—“a really incredibly aggressive timeframe for a brand new airframe,” Tuthill acknowledged. For comparison, that’s approximately two-thirds the amount of time it took Boeing and Airbus to certify their latest clean-sheet designs, the 787 and A350, respectively.&nbsp;
“They can’t afford mistakes,” he said of JetZero, which has garnered investment from major air carriers including Delta, United, and Alaska. “The digital twin allows them to fly the aircraft before it’s built, and it allows them to build the aircraft before the factory exists,” he explained. “I want to make the mistakes really early. I want to do them in a digital world, so I can correct them before I’m ever in a physical world. And that’s what a digital twin allows you to do. It allows you to build, fly, operate, and do all the things with the aircraft before it really exists.”
In addition to aircraft design, digital twins are being used by JetZero and others in the aerospace industry to plan and simulate production lines. Building a production facility for a new aircraft requires several hundred million dollars, and mistakes in the planning process are costly to fix once a factory is up and running.
“I can’t wait to build a factory to find out I [designed] a factory wrong,” Tuthill said. With digital twins, manufacturers can simulate workflows and identify potential issues before breaking ground on a factory. Having a digital twin of a production line could also help to streamline the process of obtaining an FAA production certificate, in addition to the aircraft type certificate.
In JetZero’s case, “They’re betting their company on our technology—that they’re going to design it right the first time [and] that their manufacturing will be production-certified on time,” he said.
<h2>Immersive Engineering</h2>
At the Paris Air Show this week, attendees can see a new evolution of Siemens’ digital twin technologies in action at the company’s chalet, where it is demonstrating an immersive engineering experience that it says will open the door to the “industrial metaverse.”
In an industrial metaverse, engineers and technicians can visualize and interact with virtual 3D models, or digital twins, in real-world industrial settings while maintaining natural vision. Siemens is working with Sony to introduce this technology using Sony’s SRH-S1 headset as a platform.
Scheduled for commercial launch in December, the NX Immersive Designer fuses augmented reality, generative artificial intelligence, and natural language processing capabilities to give users an immersive and interactive experience.
The headset features high-definition 1.3-type OLED microdisplays with 4K resolution, and it uses proprietary rendering technology to enable real-time, high-definition, and realistic renderings of 3D objects, according to Siemens. It comes with ring and pointer controllers optimized for intuitive interaction with 3D objects and precise pointing, and users can interact with the interface using voice commands.
For science fiction aficionados, the immersive engineering technology that Siemens is developing might sound like something akin to the holodeck seen in “Star Trek.” According to Tuthill, that’s essentially what it is, or at least where it’s headed. “The holodeck is going to be around pretty soon, and we are one of the leading companies in technology delivering that,” he said.

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