The UK aerospace sector is used to being world-class. It holds a ten per cent share of the global market, contributes £14.3 billion a year to the UK economy, and supports more than 100,000 skilled jobs. But according to a major new policy paper from the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC), that leadership position is not guaranteed, and the next five years will decide whether the UK keeps it.
Published to mark the AMRC's 25th anniversary and launched this week at the Farnborough International Airshow, Flying high: Driving innovation, resilience and growth of UK aerospace sets out exactly what's at stake, and what needs to happen next. As a company that was born out of the AMRC and now works inside aerospace factories every day, we wanted to share why this matters to us, and to every manufacturer in the supply chain.
Airbus and Boeing are preparing to launch entirely new single-aisle aircraft families. Rolls-Royce is aiming to re-enter the narrowbody engine market for the first time in over a decade with its UltraFan technology. And globally, the industry needs to deliver an estimated 65,000 new aircraft by 2050 (the majority of them single-aisle models), while hitting decarbonisation targets at the same time.
That means two things happening at once: a step-change in production rates, and a wave of new materials, digital tools and manufacturing processes arriving faster than ever. By the end of this decade, OEMs will be choosing which suppliers get to build their future aircraft and engine programmes. Suppliers who can't show they've already adopted the right capabilities risk being left out.
The AMRC's paper is blunt about where the pressure will land hardest: Tier 1 suppliers. These are the businesses that sit in the critical middle of the supply chain, and they often have the least visibility of what's coming next, and the fewest resources to invest in new capability ahead of time.
We know this challenge first-hand, because FourJaw exists because of it. We spun out of the AMRC in 2020, built on the idea that manufacturers can't improve what they can't see. Our real-time machine monitoring technology helps manufacturers understand exactly how their factory floor is performing, minute by minute, so they can cut downtime and lift productivity without waiting years for a full-scale automation overhaul.
That's exactly the kind of capability the policy paper points to as essential for the industry's future: data, digital tools and visibility of shop-floor performance sit right alongside robotics, automation and lightweight materials as the technologies suppliers will need to adopt to compete for the next generation of aircraft programmes.
It's also why our work with Bristol-based AVPE Systems made it into the paper as a case study. By giving AVPE real-time visibility of machine performance, we helped the business increase shop floor production time by 30 per cent, the kind of productivity gain that matters enormously when, as the AMRC notes, "every minute of production time counts" in aerospace manufacturing.
The AMRC's core recommendations to government and industry are:
That second point is one we see up close every day. The manufacturers making the fastest gains right now aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest capital budgets. They're the ones getting real, usable data out of the machines they already have, and using it to make faster decisions on the shop floor.
The AMRC's ambition, backed by the ATI's Engineering Growth strategy, is to double the UK's share of the global aerospace market by 2035. That's genuinely achievable. The UK already has the OEMs, the supply chain depth, and 25 years of proven innovation behind it through the AMRC and the wider High Value Manufacturing Catapult network.
But doubling market share while ramping up production rates and cutting carbon at the same time won't happen by accident. It will happen because suppliers throughout the chain, from OEMs down to SMEs, get the visibility, tools and skills they need to compete now, not in five years' time.
We're proud of where FourJaw came from, and prouder still to be part of the answer to a challenge this important. If you want the full picture, the AMRC's policy paper is well worth your time.
Full policy paper from the AMRC: https://www.amrc.co.uk/pages/aerospace-policy-paper .