Collins Aerospace breaks ground for wind tunnel test facility in Rockford

ROCKFORD — Collins Aerospace broke ground at its Harrison Avenue campus Wednesday for the construction of an $18 million wind tunnel test site designed to streamline how the company’s Ram Air Turbines are manufactured and evaluated.

Ram Air Turbines serve as an emergency power source when an airplane loses hydraulic or electric power in flight. By rotating its small turbine, the system extracts sufficient power from the airstream to allow the pilot to safely land the plane.

“There are times when airplanes have issues, and when they have issues they need a Ram Air Turbine to get planes back down to the ground safely and when it does that it saves lives,” said Stan Kottke, vice president for Collins Aerospace Electric Power Systems. “So, in the 40-plus years of manufacturing and testing here in Rockford, we have saved over 2,000 lives with Ram Air Turbines. That’s really a significant pride that we have here in Rockford.”

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The wind tunnel will be the third such test facility at the company’s Rockford site but the first to be built locally in more than 20 years.

To simulate the environment of an in-flight power loss, the tunnel will deploy a powerful fan to create a wind speed of up to 170 miles per hour.

The wind tunnel is scheduled to become operational by summer 2022 and will test turbines of all sizes for business, regional, single aisle, widebody and military aircraft.

“As airplanes become larger and require more power, our Ram Air Turbines have grown bigger and bigger over the history of the product,” Kottke said. “When we first started making Ram Air Turbines, they had a 19-inch diameter and 19-inch fan. Now, our most modern Ram Air Turbines are 50 to 64 inches in diameter and weigh about 400 pounds.”

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The construction of a state-of-the-art wind tunnel in Rockford is significant for Collins Aerospace, its employees and the community, Kottke said.

“It says we’re going to be here for decades,” he said. “Not just here, but we’re going to continue to grow, There’s a reason why we’re keeping our old wind tunnels in place, yet building another one. We see the future of air travel to continuously grow over long periods of time and so we want to have our infrastructure in place to be able to take advantage of that.”

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Ken DeCoster: kdecoster@rrstar.com; @DeCosterKen