The UK aerospace sector is a successful, vibrant, high value high technology engineering, manufacturing and service industry that generates good returns to all its stakeholders. With over £20 billion per annum in value added revenue and employing over 100,000 directly, and over 220,000 indirectly, the industry is one of the UK’s largest exporters adding around £2.8 billion annually to the UK balance of trade and involves around 2600 companies across all regions of the UK. A characteristic of the industry is its large scale need for a broad range of high value skills and disciplines, from engineering and science, production, service, training and financial skills at all levels. As an industry, it has proved resilient through numerous cycles and has proved so again as it maintained deliveries and revenues as a sector through the recent global economic recession.

Opportunities

There are significant opportunities ahead for the UK civil aerospace sector, in the medium term with the A320 / 737 series New Short Range (NSR) replacement programmes and the unmanned aerial systems (UAS) market emergence offering future growth prospects, whilst in the shorter term, new programmes such as the Airbus A350XWB and A400M, Boeing 787, Bombardier C Series and possible Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 re-engining offer a substantial workload to the UK sector. New regional and business aircraft and emerging platforms from new prime contractors (e.g. in China, India, Japan, Russia and Brazil) are also targets for the UK sector. Next generation rotorcraft will also be developed, offering lower noise and operating costs, with unconventional configurations offering much higher speeds. 

Environmental regulations and considerations are key drivers for the latest technology developments, with the UK particularly well-placed to exploit this trend, having strong capabilities in all relevant areas such as technology, manufacturing and regulatory frameworks.

Rapid Change

The industry at large is entering a period of unusually rapid change which will throw up major challenges and opportunities. These include the emergence of high growth strategic markets in the Middle/Far East and India, coupled with the growth of state-sponsored start-up enterprises specifically aimed at competing with the current prime and tier 1 companies. Another shorter term consideration for the sector is managing the impact of the recent global economic recession and preparing to take maximum advantage of the return to longer term growth rates in due course.

Significant extra investments will required from industry and the Government to keep the UK aerospace sector in its current leadership position and also exploit the emerging growth areas. Geeration of critical intellectual property (IP) and know-how will be essential in maintaining manufacturing investment and jobs within the UK.

Leadership Role

The UK has an important leadership role in the development of future air traffic management systems and associated operational procedures. These are fundamental to the industry’s ability to meet the agreed environmental targets while increasing airspace capacity to accommodate the projected traffic growth and will drive the need for greater integration across the aviation and space sectors. Improving the travel experience for the general public will require more integrated, efficient and speedier security systems, which the UK has a leading position in.  

The aerospace industry, as a high technology high innovation sector, depends greatly on the successful outcome of the skills and education initiatives currently underway and planned for the future, together with the benefits derived from the Supply Chains for the Twenty First Century (SC21) programme, which are all closely linked and are run through key initiatives in ADS. Developing these programmes further is a key objective of the AeroSpace Team in ADS for the near term.

Given the extent of the opportunity for UK Aerospace and ADS’ role in supporting and enabling this, we have recently expanded the Aerospace Team within ADS to ensure we can support all these initiatives fully; details of the team can be found elsewhere in this site.