Industry Seeks Standards On 3D Printing, Automated Inspections

Automated aircraft inspections and additive manufacturing are creating efficiencies in the aftermarket and aerospace supply chain, but there is not yet an industry consensus about standardized guidelines for their use.

Two new industry initiatives seek to drive standards-making for these advanced technologies, which stakeholders hope will improve safety, create guidance and reduce barriers to use.

International standards association SAE formed a new committee in August 2024 that plans to tackle the development of standards related to automated aircraft exterior inspections, such as those conducted using drones or other inspection technologies. The G-38 committee was formally launched this January to create guidelines for companies that want to perform automated aircraft inspections.

This will include providing recommendations for equivalency requirements when replacing physical inspections with automated ones and exploring standards for using image data they generate.

According to David Alexander, senior director of standards at SAE International, the committee is bringing together stakeholders such as Airbus, Boeing and Delta Air Lines alongside aviation regulators and inspection technology providers “to provide some consensus guidance on how everybody can be utilizing automated inspection techniques” and “smooth the pathway through consensus standardization to regulatory approval.”

The committee’s kickoff meeting was in March, and it is welcoming interested participants to share perspectives and shape recommendations.

Alexander says the benefit of developing industry-wide standards for automated inspections is that “everybody will ultimately come around to the same approach to provide this baseline for people to work from. It will accelerate things because it will enable the ultimate users ... to be managing a more cohesive approach from their different suppliers, whether that’s the technology companies or the aircraft OEMs, and it will provide a common, agreed set of initial guidelines that will give a greater degree of trust for the regulators, knowing that [this] has been through the rigor of the SAE consensus process.”

Meanwhile, standards development organization ASTM launched a new program dedicated to additive manufacturing (AM) certification for the aerospace sector in June. ASTM’s Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence partnered with industry stakeholders such as Boeing, GE Aerospace, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, MTU Aero Engines, Safran and ST Engineering to identify their frustrations and find out how their suppliers manage their differing requirements for additively manufactured components.

According to Sergio Sanchez, a former Boeing engineer who now leads business development for ASTM’s advanced manufacturing division, many suppliers in regulated sectors like aerospace have limited resources “and are bombarded or given a set of requirements or technical data packages by different companies all the time, at different times,” which is difficult for small- to medium-sized suppliers to manage and can cause safety risks and part delivery delays. This could mean dozens or even hundreds of individual requirements from one OEM, even though Sanchez estimates that around 60-70% overlap between companies. “But [AM suppliers are] having to figure out how to document compliance to these requirements and language, which makes the operation very inefficient, and in the process, things can get missed,” he says.

Sanchez says ASTM realized it needed to “bring the industry together and come up with a framework that standardizes the fundamental requirements around the quality and production for AM components” so the burden is removed from suppliers and simplified for OEMs.

This means an AM provider can “point to this specific standard and certification, and as long as [they have] this certification, [they are] able to comply with a big portion of the requirements that these companies traditionally ask for,” Sanchez says.

Ahead of the program’s launch, ASTM and its industry partners performed several pilot audits with selected suppliers such as AM Craft, an aviation-focused additive parts provider, to refine the auditing criteria and process for certifying vendors. Sanchez says the program should speed up supplier qualification and time to market, while also improving consistency and “establishing trust in what today has been a very fragmented AM landscape.”

Sanchez reports a positive industry response to the program so far. For example, he says several large UK-based OEMs recently learned about the program and asked to participate.