A few years back, I watched a small machine shop nearly lose everything because they picked the wrong aerospace parts supplier. They’d landed a subcontract to produce brackets for a commercial aircraft program — exciting stuff for a ten-person shop. But the raw material they sourced through a cheap supplier turned out to have traceability issues. No proper mill certs, no clear chain of custody. The prime contractor caught it during an audit, and suddenly that exciting subcontract became a nightmare of rework, delays, and legal fees. The shop survived, barely, but the owner told me he aged five years in six months.
That story stuck with me, and it’s why I take the subject of aerospace approved suppliers seriously.
What “Aerospace Approved” Actually Means
Being an aerospace approved supplier means you’ve demonstrated that your quality systems, processes, and products meet the strict standards set by aviation authorities and airframe manufacturers. It’s not a participation trophy. The certification process is rigorous, the audits are thorough, and maintaining your status requires ongoing investment in quality.
Probably should have led with this: the aerospace industry cannot tolerate quality failures the way other industries sometimes can. A faulty bracket in a piece of furniture is annoying. A faulty bracket in a flight control system is catastrophic. That’s why the bar is set so high.
The Standards You Need to Know
If you’re looking at aerospace suppliers — or trying to become one — there are a few key standards you’ll encounter over and over.
AS9100 is the big one. It’s a quality management system standard built specifically for aerospace. It takes ISO 9001 as a foundation and adds aerospace-specific requirements around risk management, product safety, configuration management, and more. If a supplier has AS9100 certification, it means their quality system has been audited and approved by an accredited third party.
NADCAP — the National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program — focuses on special processes. We’re talking heat treating, welding, non-destructive testing, surface treatment, that sort of thing. These are processes where quality can’t be verified just by inspecting the finished part. You have to know the process was controlled correctly from start to finish. NADCAP accreditation means an independent body has verified that.
There’s also AS9110 for repair stations and AS9120 for distributors. Each addresses the specific risks and requirements of those parts of the supply chain.
How Suppliers Get Qualified
The qualification process goes something like this. A company applies and submits documentation about their quality systems. Then an audit happens — either by the potential customer or a third-party registrar. The auditors go through everything: how you manage materials, how you control your manufacturing processes, how you inspect parts, how you maintain traceability.
They’ll find issues. They always do, even at good shops. What matters is how you respond to findings. Minor findings need corrective action plans. Major findings might need to be fixed before you can proceed. It’s not unusual for the qualification process to take several months.
Once you’re approved, it’s not a “set it and forget it” situation. You get re-audited on a regular schedule. Drop the ball and you lose your approved status, which means you lose access to those contracts.
Why It’s Worth the Hassle
I won’t sugarcoat it — getting and keeping aerospace approval takes real effort and real money. But the benefits are substantial.
First, it opens doors. Aerospace primes and OEMs overwhelmingly prefer — or outright require — approved suppliers. No certification, no bid. It’s that simple for many programs.
Second, going through the process genuinely improves your operations. The discipline of maintaining AS9100 or NADCAP forces you to document your processes, train your people, and look for inefficiencies. I’ve talked to shop owners who said the certification process made them a better company even beyond their aerospace work.
Third, it’s a reputation signal. Being on the approved supplier lists maintained by certification bodies gives you visibility. Other potential customers in aerospace — and sometimes in other industries — see that certification and know you’re operating at a high level.
The Hard Parts
Keeping up with standards requires significant investment. Training isn’t cheap. Calibration programs aren’t cheap. Document control systems aren’t cheap. And the standards themselves keep evolving, so you’re always adjusting.
Staffing can be a challenge too. You need people who understand quality systems and can maintain them. Finding qualified quality engineers and inspectors in today’s job market — especially if you’re a smaller shop in a smaller city — isn’t easy.
Meeting delivery schedules consistently is another pressure point. Aerospace programs don’t tolerate late deliveries well. If your part is late, the assembly stops. If the assembly stops, the aircraft delivery slips. If the aircraft delivery slips, the airline or the Air Force is not happy. And that unhappiness flows downhill fast.
Key Areas Where Suppliers Need to Focus
- Traceability: You need to be able to trace every part back to its raw material source. Every heat lot, every batch of fasteners, every sheet of aluminum. If there’s ever a quality escape, this is how you contain the problem.
- Document management: Procedures, work instructions, inspection records, certifications — all of it needs to be controlled, current, and accessible. Auditors will ask for specific documents and expect to see them quickly.
- Risk management: Identify what could go wrong and have plans in place. This includes vetting your own suppliers, managing process changes, and monitoring for trends in nonconformances.
- Training: Everyone touching aerospace product needs to be trained and competent. Not just trained once — regular refreshers and competency assessments are expected.
- Communication with customers: Keep your customers informed. If there’s a problem, they want to hear it from you early, not discover it during receiving inspection. Transparency builds trust and helps you keep that approved status.
Technology in the Mix
Newer technologies are changing what’s possible for aerospace suppliers, but they also bring new challenges.
Additive manufacturing — 3D printing — lets you create complex geometries that would be impossible or prohibitively expensive with traditional machining. But the qualification requirements for additively manufactured aerospace parts are still being developed. You can’t just print a part and ship it. There’s extensive testing and validation required.
Advanced composites offer incredible strength-to-weight performance. Working with carbon fiber and similar materials requires specialized equipment and training. Not every shop can or should try to get into composites.
Automated inspection using robotics and advanced imaging is reducing human error and speeding up quality checks. That’s what makes automated inspection endearing to quality managers — it’s more consistent than human inspection, especially for repetitive checks on high-volume parts.
Who Handles Certification
The International Aerospace Quality Group (IAQG) oversees the AS9100 series. They accredit the certification bodies that actually conduct the audits. The Performance Review Institute (PRI) runs the NADCAP program and handles those audits.
Both organizations maintain databases of approved suppliers that aerospace companies use when sourcing. Being listed in those databases is like being in the phone book — except people actually look at these.
Keeping Your Status Long-Term
A few things that help:
Run internal audits regularly. Don’t wait for the external auditors to find problems. Find them yourself and fix them first. This isn’t just good practice — it’s an AS9100 requirement.
Invest in continuous improvement. Whether it’s Lean, Six Sigma, or just a structured approach to fixing problems and preventing recurrence, having a real improvement culture makes a difference. The shops that treat quality as a checkbox tend to struggle. The ones that treat it as a way of working tend to thrive.
Build real relationships with your customers and your certification body. Be responsive. Be transparent. When issues come up — and they will — how you handle them matters more than whether they happen in the first place.
Bottom line: becoming and staying an aerospace approved supplier is hard work. But for companies willing to commit to it, it’s a path to stable, meaningful work in an industry where quality isn’t just a preference — it’s a requirement.
