In the design of aircraft structures, Antonio leads the “Fatigue & Damage Tolerance” team analysing and assessing aeronautical structures fatigue performance, working at Leonardo’s Pomigliano d’Arco site in active collaboration with the Turin and Venegono plants. Antonio has participated in a number of programmes over the course of his career at Leonardo, including the ATR, C-27J Spartan, Eurofighter, M-346, M-345, Tornado, F-35 and CS100 (currently Airbus A220) projects, for which he has also led work on structural trials, laboratory testing and the qualification of new technological processes.
Over the course of 17 years working with Leonardo, Antonio has become an authority in the discipline of “fatigue”, a key factor in the break-down of aeronautical structures: a field closely related to his highly specialised university studies. Antonio’s predisposition for technological innovation earned him the 2018 Leonardo Innovation Award for his “NEMESIS" project (Nano Embedded Material for Energy Sustainability on aircraft Innovative Structures).
Since joining the Group, Antonio has enjoyed plenty of opportunities to participate in innovative programmes that, as he tells us, “all represented a challenge, and in all of which I put my great passion for engineering and aeronautics to work”. These include the JSF – F-35 programme he worked on when he first joined Leonardo, a project that “gave me so much in terms of work experience, know-how and, above all, human relationships. This was the first time I had worked on the design of a real advanced military aircraft, as a member of a highly organised team of specialists and together with an international partner of the calibre of Lockheed Martin”.
Antonio sees technology as a tool that needs to be increasingly used to protect the environment: “I’m very concerned about the fate of our planet and, as a technician, I have a special interest in all production processes that can safeguard the sustainability of energy resources and thus restrict their impact on the environment”. In this context, Antonio and his Fatigue & Damage Tolerance team are playing an active role in Leonardo’s commitment to REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals), the many goals of which include putting an end to the use of harmful substances in industrial processes. An example of this is Hexavalent Chrome, widely used in surface treatments for aluminium alloys. To this end, a series of experiments and tests are being conducted with the goal of replacing these chemical agents with equivalent substances that have a more sustainable impact on the environment.
The most promising of the many research programmes and innovative processes Antonio is working on is undoubtedly Additive Manufacturing, which he describes as “the most challenging innovative production process, in which we are working on the design and production of lightweight, resistant and safe aeronautical components”.
In short, Antonio sees working with Leonardo as an opportunity to join “a group of people who share the same love of challenges and technological innovation. A company in which it is still possible to make your dreams come true and do what you really love doing!” Because Leonardo is synonymous with know-how, innovation, challenges and passion; “working with Leonardo not only means imagining the future, it means actively building it through technologies, collaboration and team spirit.”