While clean-sheet aircraft designs hit the market from time to time and draw attention, much of the improvement in aerospace engineering is applied incrementally to new models. Though not as flashy as a futuristic rendering, these progressions today often incorporate advanced materials elegantly woven into an existing type-certificated design.
Alongside these new materials, the industry has adopted new ways of manufacturing in pursuit of lowering costs, building efficiency, and reducing waste. Solutions go beyond those now-common ones involving 3D printing and its corollary, additive manufacturing, where a component is built by layering material into a given shape rather than carving it out of a block—which, if done correctly, produces much less discarded material. Indeed, many OEMs have entered a world where the life cycle of the material itself takes center stage. And, the improvements are not just in the material itself, but in how it is reused to reduce cost and impact on the planet.
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