On Monday April 6th Stavatti began deployment of SolidWorks 2009 Premium as Stavatti’s primary PLM/CAD solution. SolidWorks 2009, a product of Dassault Systems SolidWorks Corp., was selected to compliment currently fielded Stavatti CAD solutions and serve as a support element to CAD performed using CATIA workstations. Although Dassault Systems CATIA will serve as the principal CAD solution for future aircraft design and development, SolidWorks 2009 will provide a powerful yet economical CAD system to address a majority of engineering design needs.

Over the past 15 years, Stavatti has evaluated a wide variety of CAD and more recently PLM/CAD systems to satisfy aerospace vehicle design needs including CATIA, SolidWorks, Pro-E, Unigraphics, Cobalt, Vectorworks, Autocad, etc., with CATIA being selected as the most appropriate for our engineering design needs. Recent advancements in the SolidWorks program have resulted in a CAD solution which Stavatti perceives can satisfy a majority of design needs which three years ago could only be addressed by CATIA. Using a joint CATIA-SolidWorks 2009 solution, it is predicted that approximately 75% of all future design work will be performed using SolidWorks with 25% being performed using CATIA and other solutions.

The first Stavatti aerospace vehicle to be engineered primarily using SolidWorks Premium will be the SM-282 VTOL ISR UAV. Stavatti will begin conducting approximately all new Machete series design work, including CAD as well as a large portion of FEA and CFD, using SolidWorks Premium. The SC-100, now being designed for Skytruck, Inc. will also benefit from SolidWorks Premium.