As the market evolved post-Covid, operations came roaring back and, along with it, demand on global aerospace suppliers. Demand alone presented challenges, but other issues have placed pressures on the supply chain, from regional conflicts and workforce shortages to one-off disruptive events such as a factory fire at SPS Technologies in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. AIN brought together thought leaders in the supply chain and broader market to share insights on how the industry is tackling these challenges. Here are highlights from those discussions. FDH Aero sponsored this roundtable.
The Participants
Ian Walsh—CEO of FDH Aero
Walsh joined FDH Aero this year with 35 years of leadership experience, including as chairman of Kaman Aerospace and COO of REV Group, along with senior roles with Textron. With a more than 60-year history, FDH Aero is one of the largest independent aerospace distributors globally, supplying hardware, electrical, and other products and services across the military and civil aerospace markets with 14 locations globally and 1,500 employees.
Alex Trapp—Senior v-p of business development for StandardAero
Trapp, who joined StandardAero in 2016 after serving as v-p commercial at Rolls-Royce North America, leads enterprise-wide strategy development and activity around new engine platforms, joint ventures, and mergers and acquisitions. Founded in 1911, StandardAero is one of the largest independent MRO providers offering engine and component services for business aviation, commercial aviation, military, fixed-wing, helicopter, and industrial power customers. The company, which recently went public, operates 49 primary facilities worldwide with 7,500 employees.
Mike Stengel—Partner at AeroDynamic Advisory
Stengel joined AeroDynamic in 2017 after serving with ICF International’s aerospace practice. At AeroDynamic, he oversees the firm’s aftermarket-related intellectual property and has led or contributed to more than 100 consulting engagements surrounding business strategy, market analysis, and transaction advisory for clients across the aerospace industry. AeroDynamic provides expert aerospace consulting services in areas of strategy, growth, and transaction support for OEMs and aftermarket organizations.
James Allen—Chief procurement officer of GKN Aerospace’s civil business
Allen joined GKN Aerospace’s Civil Business in September 2023 with a background in asset management and procurement with companies including Arriva Group, where he served as chief procurement officer, and Babcock International. His background also includes roles with McKinsey & Company and Airbus. GKN Aerospace is a global tier 1 supplier of airframe and engine structures, landing gear, electrical interconnection systems, transparencies, and aftermarket services for commercial and military aircraft.
The Discussion
On the State of the Supply Chain and How It Has Evolved:
Ian Walsh
It is a very complex, evolving problem. In business, we love stability, but the reality is there’s constant variation. Everybody witnessed Covid as a unique situation that created a very dramatic shift in the availability of materials and parts.
I experienced three phases. The first was before Covid. The [OEM] environment was, “Let’s put the thumbs on everybody so we can get costs down.” People were trying desperately to become much more affordable manufacturers, and what they found was that it had the opposite effect. It compromised quality; it compromised a lot of things. Then Covid hit, which created another shift, and that was about availability.
After Covid, the premium now is not around cost. It’s not around availability. It’s actually full circle. It’s around quality. Are you a reliable quality supplier? People will pay a premium for that versus before, when it was a constant battle to find a low-cost solution.
Where FDH is striving, what we’re trying to demonstrate is that we are the most reliable, capable, and quality supplier out there.
Alex Trapp
The supply chain in the aerospace business pre-Covid and post-Covid has always been challenging. It’s always one part, one group of parts, one supplier, or one OEM or another that is having a particular challenge at a particular time, and that varies. We’re pretty used to that in the A&D business, especially in MRO.
Some things have changed since Covid, with the uptick in supply and demand and the geopolitical impacts on the general supply chain. But things have evolved where you look to diversify your supply base and digitize your supply chain. And so, some positive things have accelerated.
Mike Stengel
I think the most obvious impacts that we’re seeing from all these kinks and bottlenecks are that the fleet has gotten older quickly over the last five to six years. It started with the [Boeing] Max grounding, and then it was accelerated by the downshift in aircraft production and deliveries during Covid. In 2022, the airlines were expecting to get their Maxes and [Airbus] Neos that they deferred back pretty quickly. Then, that didn’t happen. It’s been a slow ramp-up. There have been some other issues, like the Boeing strike. Now that’s behind them.
But we don’t expect aircraft production to get back to pre-Covid levels until about 2028. Meanwhile, air travel demand is back above 2019 levels. So, you have this gap in air travel demand versus supply of aircraft.
We’re not out of the woods yet. There’s still a lot more downside risk that things continue to slip to the right. There are still a lot of kinks in the supply chain. I call it a game of Whac-a-Mole: as soon as one issue is solved, another unexpected issue arises. Like back in February, there was the fire at a key fastener facility in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. So, it’s going to be a bumpy ride back up for sure.
James Allen
I think in recent months we are seeing some stabilization. But if you look back before Covid, we had growth in volumes of aircraft produced and in defense programs. That ramp-up was incremental year by year. A lot of OEMs were at record volumes pre-Covid, went to almost zero, and then recovered back at a pace that was multiples faster than they’d ever ramped up in the first instance. I think it was the speed of the ramp-up post-Covid that put incredible stress on the supply chain.
During Covid, the supply chain had challenges in terms of deferred investment and people leaving the workforce. So, we’ve had a perfect storm in terms of an unprecedented speed of ramp-up with a supply chain that had been weakened by what had happened during Covid. At GKN Aerospace, that situation is stabilizing now. Those increases in volumes have slowed. We’re still seeing increases, and we expect further increases to come, but it’s slowed certainly from 2024 to 2025, and that allows the supply chain time to stabilize and to recover.
We have particular challenges in specific niches, and that might be a niche of a product type, or of a particular geography, or transportation links. Those aren’t systemic issues, but they’re things we’ll have to manage.
On Managing through the Supply Chain
Ian Walsh
Some of the things that we’re looking at, which are not out of the ordinary, are trying to become closer with our suppliers. The other part of it is to get closer to our customers and understand their needs and how predictive they can be in their schedules.
Even though a Boeing or an Airbus or whoever will tell you a schedule, many times those move around. And, certainly in the aftermarket side, it’s very unpredictable. When maintenance needs come up, [some of those parts can be] hard to source.
The types of parts that we do are small consumable things—hundreds of thousands of different types of parts, and no single bolt or collar is the same. You can’t be everything to everybody. You’ve got to focus on certain families of parts, things that we feel are the right parts in terms of how we like to source and distribute. So, we’re trying to understand the global supply base.
It’s not overly complex. You can’t wait for the phone to ring. You’ve got to be tight with your supply base and your customer base.
James Allen
We invest a lot of time in terms of resources, people, and technology in terms of how we manage the supply chain. You’ll always have to manage those challenges. Looking forward, I think the production rates will start to increase again in the period to the end of this decade. That will undoubtedly unveil some new challenges that we’ve got to solve to get there.
The fire in Pennsylvania impacted a large part of the supply chain; it was significant. So, we spent a lot of time understanding what the impact would be and how good the mitigations we had in place were.
Structurally, in our supply chain, we carry an appropriate level of inventory—not necessarily us carrying it, [but] people in the supply chain carrying that on our behalf. That protected us from the immediate impacts of the fire. That gave us the time to solve the problem in terms of understanding the challenges of the availability of specific parts, and if we need to find alternative sources. But we found that the mitigations that we put in place were successful in giving us enough time to solve the problem.
We work to have the right amount of stock or inventory at the right level, and whether we hold that or whether it’s held within the supply chain, that provides a degree of buffer effectively against shocks. But I think, across the supply chain, we’ve got to make sure that we use working capital effectively. There’s a degree of capital you need tied up in inventory. We want to optimize that so that the capital is available to invest. If everyone’s got capital to invest in technology or productivity improvements, that’s more productive than having it tied up in an inventory.
Alex Trapp
The majority of our new parts as an engine MRO come straight from the manufacturer. So we’re very OEM- aligned. We have been for decades, which gets us a seat at the table for getting priority allocation of parts. That can be important just because of the demand set.
It’s not just about the aftermarket. It’s about parts going to new manufactured engines and parts going to spare engines. The OEMs are trying to please numerous constituencies in the marketplace, especially on the newer engines. That leads you down to the castings and forging supply base. That’s under pressure, and it always has been, but particularly since Covid. The OEMs are beholden to the success or failure of that supply. That sort of worries me only because we can’t really control that. We don’t manage those suppliers. It’s the sub-suppliers of the OEMs that are problematic from time to time.
What we do to manage through the supply chain—maybe not differently, but in greater doses—is the use of repairs. Instead of buying new parts from suppliers, we look to repair parts and make them serviceable again. We’ve done that by building up our capability both through organic and inorganic investment.
We also seek to use serviceable material as much as possible to supplement any supply-chain disruptions that we see for particular parts. There’s typically good economics associated with that for both StandardAero and customers. We’ve got some key strategic workarounds that we’ve used in the past and that we’ve also invested in over the last several years.
Mike Stengel
[Companies are] adjusting as best they can, but it is still challenging. For example, Russia was a major source of titanium. In 2014, when Russia invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula, Boeing had moved away from Russia as a source of titanium and stockpiled a lot. But other OEMs hadn’t. There’s still a lot of reliance on that source of material. Now, there are concerns about rare earth minerals because of trade wars with China, and castings and forgings are still an issue. Unless there’s more forging capacity added, that could be a barrier to significantly raising aircraft production rates.
With the ongoing geopolitical tensions and uncertainty, you would imagine that if certain capacities come offline or can’t be used anymore, then others would invest in new capacity. That hasn’t been the case. Those incumbents have instead chosen to leverage their position. They would contend that there’s a chance that relations with Russia thaw, and then that capacity comes back online and their investment is undermined. It’s this game of chicken that you’re playing with various patches of the supply chain. It’s very hard to make a long-term investment decision like that.
On Tariffs
Ian Walsh
There is no single-point solution right at the moment. We are really baselining exactly what we know. We know who our customers are, where we’re sourcing parts, and where we’re delivering parts. That’s the first piece. The second is monitoring what the changes are, because as soon as we understand something, it could shift. And then, the third is being able to track exactly what the tariff is and how to handle it.
Most people think a tariff comes in when you buy something or sell something. But if you’re sourcing something from another country, it’s not that easy. Your payment is through the deliverer, meaning FedEx, for example. They’re the ones charging the duty. So, that’s a delay—you’re charging it in the bill of lading after the fact.
We’re sourcing hundreds of thousands of parts. How do you associate a tariff when you open up a box, and you’ve got thousands of parts? Because they’re going to different places and doing different things, that adds a level of complexity. Once we understand the footprint, what’s happening? Are we in compliance? Can we really map it out properly? What can we do to manage it better?
We’re looking at different countries where there are different trade agreements in place today and trying to take advantage of those. People are going to start brokering new deals with different countries. We have to stay on top of that.
The last piece is that aerospace and defense is a critical industry. I don’t care what country you’re in. People are now realizing that you’re going to have to probably make some exceptions when it comes to tariffs and duties, and we’re seeing some of that. That could be a relief. But right now, it’s ongoing and taking a lot of time.
It’s not just the cost. It’s a huge distraction for management. We have to take a lot of our people and spend time trying to figure out, track, and distill all of this information and make sure we’re compliant versus doing what we’re supposed to be doing every day.
James Allen
We don’t see tariffs as a positive thing. We see it as something that adds complexity and adds administration to how the supply chain works. The rate of change in that situation has slowed in recent weeks from a point when things were changing daily. However, if we end up with a situation where you’ve got going into the U.S., broadly 10% tariffs, that’s not a positive outcome.
We’re assessing the challenges, and we’re working out ways to mitigate them. But at the moment, it’s adding an administrative burden.
The longer-term impacts will depend on where we end up. We’ve considered whether we need to change locations for certain things. That’s not a short-term activity; that’s many months of activity. Those are things we are studying but haven’t made any decisions on. If we have to do that, that obviously introduces new complexity and risk.
We’re in discussions with our customers and suppliers about how tariffs work, the responsibility for them, but then ultimately, how you mitigate them. Some of that mitigation is where parts move into. If parts are moving into the U.S. and then back out again, there are mechanisms to reimburse those tariffs. In some cases, where parts will remain in the U.S. and we don’t see a way to mitigate it, then that’s when we get into a discussion about whether it makes sense to change locations of certain parts.
There’ve been trade agreements in place. The industry has successfully grown and thrived in that environment—where you’ve got truly global business. And that’s across civil and defense. This is why we see tariffs as a negative move, generally.
Alex Trapp
This isn’t entirely new, but it’s certainly more significant and extremely disruptive across the entire value stream—and especially management.
It isn’t causing [our] customers to behave any differently. I think it’s more of a practice to communicate transparently with customers and make sure they know what we know. Then, we can address whatever issues come from it proactively and make sure it runs smoothly.
When this first came about a few months ago, we engaged outside counsel who are experts in tariffs and trade, and started to get strategies and create scenarios about how this could look and what impact it could have. We’ve taken all that and created internal tiger teams at each of our sites to address how this will work. It’s more complex now, and we want to make sure we get it right. We’re trying to be as diligent, astute, and organized as we possibly can be.
Some of our mitigation strategy is to move where we have multiple facilities in different locations—to sort of direct work to where the tariff exposure would be minimized.
Mike Stengel
It’s still early days, so I don’t think any drastic or permanent actions have been taken yet. But this is a highly regulated industry that doesn’t adapt very quickly to things. It’s having to contend with a very dynamic policy environment where that quick adaptation is necessary, but it’s just not in this industry’s DNA and roots.
There’s still uncertainty over how long or if any of these will last. There’s a little bit of brinkmanship going on, but it creates more complexity for sure. At the end of the day, people are looking for consistency and permanence so that they can at least plan around it.
On Best Practices/Quality
James Allen
We invest a lot internally in our business in terms of quality. Two of our key KPIs [key performance indicators] across the business that we measure are escapes into our customers and the cost of poor quality. We’re continually driving those down.
We adopt the same approach in the supply chain and the same methodology. I think quality’s one of the areas where you can collaborate most easily with your suppliers because everyone has a common interest—what we describe as a zero-defect mindset and way of operation. We partner with our suppliers in terms of trying to achieve that, working collaboratively.
We host our customers within our supply chain. That might be to drive a specific improvement program on quality or delivery performance. We’ll actively participate with our suppliers. We’ll be onsite within our suppliers and maybe even into their supply chains, and our customers do the same thing to us.
The fact that we’ve got a global footprint and a global supply base means we’ve often got people close to those suppliers, close to some of the issues. If we need to put people onsite to either solve specific issues or just generally to build a strong relationship, we make sure we do that. We’ve got that advantage, given our global footprint, to be able to do that and manage a global supply base.
If you’re driving an improvement program, we have the methodologies we use around problem solving, productivity improvement, and quality improvement. We will deploy those into our supply chain and support our suppliers, especially given our scale and capability. I think that’s where we have the most impact in terms of improving the performance of our suppliers.
Ian Walsh
I spent the last 90 days visiting pretty much all of our sites around the world, trying to understand where are the constraints, where are the best practices, things like that.
The first thing is there’s a level of sophistication that I think needs to be achieved. I know AI is kind of the buzzword today, but, to me, it’s just more of a level of sophistication around what I call predictive analytics—looking at the history of who we serve, how we serve them, and what are the financials associated with that.
For example, we could buy millions of dollars of parts every year, and our job is obviously to distribute those across the globe, but there’s a proportion that doesn’t necessarily get distributed. It sits for sometimes years. We call this excess and obsolete, and try to understand that’s capital that we deploy that we’re not necessarily using. You really can’t base the business model on hoping that somebody’s going to call you someday five or seven years from now.
So, what we’re trying to do in best practices is to really understand better because we are large; we’re over a billion dollars. That critical mass allows us to have a lot of data that we can then really digest and understand to become more efficient.
The best practice is it’s not just making sure you’ve got strong relationships with your suppliers and your customers, but it’s also your own house—making sure we’re the most efficient at managing. Being a distributor is a very different and necessary element to the value chain for many reasons. We’re trying to source and distribute, while getting really efficient at understanding every single part we have and where it is.
The other thing is touching all of our customers around the globe. Is it better to send a part from this country to that country or to have something in the country to be closer to those customers? Those are the kinds of things that we’re looking at.
[On quality], we’re concentrating our efforts on our in-house system—and this is another value-added activity. Imagine thousands and thousands of parts, small things typically. A customer doesn’t have the manpower to inspect or check all of those parts, right? We can provide that value-added activity. We’re trying to increase the level of quality, inspection, and conformance. When we deliver a part, we’re delivering the paperwork to let them know that that part has been checked by us. That helps the customers out dramatically.
Alex Trapp
I think of the word “scale.” We create what we call centers of excellence around specific engine platforms. We execute our operations at scale in centers of excellence, and then we touch customers locally or regionally through the use of service centers and field service teams. And then, a global sales force that leads the front end when we’re approaching customers. So that’s kind of our best practices.
Mike Stengel
If you’re at an OEM and you’re trying to mitigate risk, some of the tools that you have are to spread the work out more—more dual and triple sourcing for your critical and pain-in-the-butt items. That does create a little bit more burden on you as the OEM, because it’s a wider spider web to oversee. It’s more sites for you to visit and audit and everything, but it’s a necessary evil in an environment like today. That helps ensure a steady and reliable supply, but comes with its challenges.
On Supply Chain Integration
Mike Stengel
Pre-Covid, I’d say a lot of the consolidation was taking place at more of the tier 1 levels. Those were the super deals, like with UTC-Collins. That space—the consolidation—has slowed down more.
The tier 3 segment of the supply chain—think of all your machine shops out there and the build-to-print shops—is heavily, heavily fragmented. In many cases, those are the suppliers struggling the most with working capital issues. So they could benefit from an injection of investment.
Ian Walsh
There’s definitely been movement, whether it’s private equity or strategics in the small-midcap environment.
I would argue that part of it is a couple of things. Number one is, aerospace defense is on the upswing. Outside of tariffs and global wars, the commercial aerospace defense market is clearly on the upswing. People love to take advantage of that.
With small midcap firms, you could be a $100 million, $200 million, or $500 million public company 10 years ago. Today, it’s hard to survive when you’re small because people have capital they can deploy to take advantage of consolidating, or taking private, or whatever the case may be. If somebody sees a huge opportunity or efficiency to gain leverage synergies, they’re going to exploit that.
The OEM space, I think, is now reverting—the pendulum swinging—as you can tell with Boeing and others, to get back to their roots. Everybody knows what’s going on there. That creates opportunities for other folks to decide how they want to establish a strategy on certain platforms.
Mike’s right. There are a lot of machine shops out there, there’s a lot of fragmentation, but if you’re a build-to-print shop and you’re capital intensive, you don’t have the margins, you don’t have the pricing power, to me, you are not going to see consolidation. Those are just people trying to do the best they can. You’re going to see consolidation around where the pricing power is and where the margin is in the cash flow generation.
Alex Trapp
I lead M&A, so I’m happy to see consolidation. We’ve been part of that equation. We’ve bought 11 companies over the last eight-ish years that I’ve been around. And so, we’ve seen a lot of that.
I agree with what Mike and Ian are saying about the drivers behind it—mostly just the extreme supply and demand, both in new production and MRO and aftermarket activities.
Another reason for consolidation that we see is the big OEMs—the big primes—they are now demanding more transparency through digital tracking and other systems capabilities, more maturity around cybersecurity. And a lot of these smaller companies just don’t have that. And so when a bigger company like StandardAero buys them, we fold them into our systems that way.
James Allen
We don’t have any specific plans around vertical integration or consolidation. Our main focus is improving the performance within our business in terms of productivity and operational excellence. Our position in the supply chain in terms of what we do as a tier 1 design and build partner is where we want to be.
But there’s certainly a degree of consolidation happening within the supply chain. Clearly, some important changes are going on with Spirit AeroSystems and the Boeing and Airbus takeovers.
On Use of Technology
Ian Walsh
Technology-wise, the first internally for us is warehouse automation. We still have businesses where we hand-pick parts, and it’s very manual. There’s a level of sophistication in automation that’s necessary. Some of our warehouses are extremely efficient and use warehouse automation and robotics, and other things to pick parts and make sure we know where they are. That is important.
Think of a warehouse as a machine. In the manufacturing world, the output of a machine, the quality of that output, how much—that’s what it’s all about. That’s efficiency, and that’s gains. You have to think of it that way. How fast can we source things, bring them in, inspect them, get them placed, effectively packaged, and out? Turning that inventory is a huge part of what we’re getting more efficient at, and using automation to do it.
Alex Trapp
I start with the use of a CRM system, which is nothing new, but they have evolved quite a bit. And we’re using ours more broadly to include or to connect to what we call the SIOP process, which is sales, inventory, and operations planning. And then, of course, there are multiple initiatives around parts visibility and kitting optimization—making sure we’ve got kitting done right, so we’re ready to go attack the engine as it’s reassembled. And then parts tracking, repair capacity, and scheduling.
James Allen
We continue to invest in what we see as the core technologies that will help us grow in the future. And that includes additive manufacturing, electrification, lightweighting—those are things that we see as important for the next generation of aircraft, but they’re also helping us today.
Additive manufacturing is a key technology that our engines division uses and is certified. That’s a new technology that gives advantages in terms of sustainability, but also helps us alleviate some issues within the supply chain. In some cases, it is new technology that will help release constraints in the supply chain.
In terms of digitization, I think the advantage that can give us is more insight into the sub-tiers of your supply chain. Typically, most organizations will understand their tier 1 well and their tier 2 to some degree, but as you get further into the supply chain, that level of transparency is more difficult.
But generally, the information’s out there, and I think digital tools and AI can help understand the supply chain down to lower tiers. And then you can see if you’ve got concentrations of risk that you need to mitigate. AI can help in terms of efficiency for sure, but I also think it can help in terms of the effectiveness of understanding your supply chain.
Mike Stengel
I want to piggyback on the inevitability of more automation. AI, I’d say, is still in its infancy, but has a lot of potential. I think there are more concrete use cases emerging, so it’s not fuzzy anymore. There are actual benefits that we’re starting to see.
One of the first applications could be helping people go down a learning curve. Over the last few years, everyone has talked about how there was a bit of a brain drain in the industry. People took early retirement or left the industry. When you have people with 30 or 40 years of experience leaving that had these relationships with suppliers and knew how the whole system worked, then you have someone come in with five or 10 years’ experience, or maybe even fresh out of school, then that creates a pretty massive learning curve. And yet you still have a system that you need to keep running smoothly. So, we’re hearing about more applications of AI in those sorts of settings.
The other emerging application is when you need to make unstructured data structured and apply it to your operations so that you can make decisions faster or make more informed decisions. We’re still seeing that play out, and we’re still in early days.
On Workforce
Alex Trapp
We’ve invested quite a bit—especially since Covid has accelerated this—in our front-end brand to potential employees and invested in systems to track down employees. And also really invested in our focus on retention. The most productive and least expensive employee is one who already has a badge on. Retention is a huge deal for us.
James Allen
During Covid, people left the workforce, and not all of them have returned. And in some cases, those were key skills and key experienced employees. I think that is easing now. However, for critical skills and capabilities, it’s a real battle for talent.
We’ll hire hundreds of engineers into our business each year. We see our ability to do that as a competitive advantage. If we can get the most talented engineers into our business, that will help us. It’s a challenge we work hard on to get and retain the right people.
Mike Stengel
The challenges are ongoing. When you ask high schoolers or college students where they might want to work, while the idea of flying objects or space vehicles is very appealing, the environment they think they have to work in is not always the best image in their mind.
I think, if the industry can convince this younger demographic that these are not the factories your father, grandfather, or grandparents worked in, then that can go a long way.
More suppliers are having to go back earlier in the talent chain to do that. So they’re working more closely in their communities with community colleges and high schools, even down to middle schools, to try to stick that idea in their minds and create that image. It at least gives them the prospect of all the exciting opportunities that [the industry] could offer.
Ian Walsh
The workforce is the aerospace and defense industry’s priority number one. It’s not just us, a distributor, looking at our own talent; it’s across the entire value chain. A generation is effectively retiring and leaving. The next generation has to think about what is manual work versus what’s automated work. What’s good paying work, right? There’s a global competition for talent.
It’s talked about in association meetings all the time, how we’re recruiting, training, making it interesting, making it more rewarding, making it better-paying. We have to make sure that we’re staying at the forefront of making these jobs and these companies the best places to work.