Read time: 17 mins.
Key highlights:
- Disadvantaged deployment: Assessing the current landscape for additive in aerospace.
- Counting on the clean sheet: Boeing, Safran & more share successes and opportunities.
- Sustainability in sequence: How commercial sustainability must go hand in hand with environmental.
This article was first published via the Additive Insight newsletter on April 4th, 2025.
“If current trends continue,” a report authored by UN Secretary-General U Thant reads, “life on Earth could be endangered.”
But for an impressive knowledge of the United Nations and its lineage of diplomats, you may think such a report is a recent one. Published in the last few years, or in this century at least. But no. Thant has been dead for 50 years. He was the third person to serve as UN Secretary-General. The cited report was published in 1968.
That year, 150 million passengers were transported by commercial air vehicles in the United States of America, according to figures from the Air Transport Association of America. Today, the US hits that figure in under two months, with 2.9 million passengers flying in or out of the country every day. Air traffic isn’t slowing down. Estimates suggest global air passenger traffic is set to double by 2042, if not before, and has doubled in size every 15 years since 1977.
Its impact on the planet is believed to amount to 2.4% of all human-induced global CO2 emissions, but that is without considering the output of emissions through the manufacture of the aircraft. Manufacturing of anything is believed to account for around a quarter of carbon emissions and around half of the world’s energy usage, so tying in manufacturing output to the impact of flying the vehicles is bound to equate to some significant numbers.
Additive manufacturing (AM) has somewhat of a storied past when it comes to both aerospace and sustainability. For the former, its ability to consolidate parts and manufacture at low volumes is a neat fit for aviation requirements, while for the latter, its use of ‘just the material you need’ has seen many hype its credentials over the years.
When exactly AM started being touted as a sustainable manufacturing tool is anyone’s guess. It probably wasn’t before the Montreal Protocol of 1987 or the UN’s Earth Summit of 1992 or the first COP Conference of 1995, but presumably by the time of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth documentary (2006) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (2007), the link was being made. By the Paris Agreement of 2015 it was certainly on the agenda.
Like many sectors, the civil aviation space is now working towards reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and with the industry’s manufacturers soon to be building the next-generation of air vehicles, AM is in a fight to make sure it is match-fit for when the blueprints are being sketched out.
The current landscape
The theory suggests additive manufacturing is a good match for the needs of the civil aerospace sector. But most in the AM space would say their younger selves had projected the technology to have had more of an impact.
