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BUSINESS AVIATION 12 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 AIRCRAFT MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY modification, industrial design process and assembly line, flight testing of inno- vative solutions, and in-service fleet sup- port. Visitors to the 2015 Paris Airshow could admire Daher's development of the world's first all-electric series production aircraft. MRO Daher provides and develops in-service support for all type and brands of aircraft and offers maintenance, repair, overhaul, and technical supervision for fleet opera- tors. This is illustrated by the company's support of training aircraft utilized by the French Defense Ministry. Retrofit Daher is capable of modifying all types/ brands of aircraft developing and offering tailored solutions for avionics moderniza- tion and the integration of mission-specific equipment or systems including the neces- sary flight testing and certification, docu- mentation, and support. TARBES, HOME OF TBM & DAHER AEROSTRUCTURES Visiting Daher at Tarbes on the Pyrenees foothills in the South of France, Philippe de Segovia toured me around the plant which manufactures structural components that go into the Airbus, Airbus Helicopters, Dassault and Embraer airplanes. Daher Tarbes aeronautic factory is impressive, overwhelming, and in my modest opinion simply unique in the world. It is different from other factories I have visited; different because it has grown over more than a century becoming part of the aviation history not only in Europe but worldwide, and different because it combines in one place production meth- ods from the earliest days of aviation (tube, fabric, metal) to modern advanced com- posites manufacturing. In Tarbes you feel history but simultaneously you can see the most modern manufacturing of composite aviation parts and subassemblies made of carbon fiber and honeycomb sandwich, or aluminum and titanium, and/or a combi- nation of both. The history in Tarbes is omnipresent; the oldest building was built by Morane- Saulnier in 1939 and is still in regular use. Some of the plant's machinery is from the 1940s and is in original state but other machinery like the metalstretching machine was in the meantime updated with modern numeric controls. The oldest equipment is still used to build parts for the still-supported (but not serially pro- duced) TB-series airplanes. DAHER MANUFACTURES subassemblies for helicopters. DAHER