Alenia's Gamble

摘要

Seeing Carbon composite material in its raw form makes it very hard to imagine airplanes built from the stuff. In a brand-new Alenia Aeronautica plant in southern Italy, just outside a town of artisans and olive groves called Grottaglie, hundreds of foot-long spools of paper-thin, half-inch-wide strands wait to be transformed. The material looks like dull-black electrical tape and feels like brittle typewriter ribbon. Wrap those strands around a mold and bake them under pressure in an autoclave, however, and they will meld into a single, super-strong piece of carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer resin, the material that promises to revolutionize the way people make airplanes.