Beyond compliance: how quality powers aerospace performance

In aerospace, quality is a given. Customers, partners and passengers expect every component, process and system to meet exacting standards. But quality is about more than meeting requirements. A strong quality culture helps us identify risk earlier, improve how we work and build the robust, repeatable processes needed to bring new technologies into production. At GKN Aerospace, that starts with people.

Across the business, we continue to invest in the skills, behaviours and capabilities that help teams get things right and keep getting better. This includes dedicated work to strengthen quality and product safety, alongside investment in the next generation of quality professionals.

Our Quality Engineering Apprenticeship Programme is one example. Launched in Bristol in 2024, it combines recognised qualifications with hands-on experience across different technologies, production processes and stages of the product lifecycle. The programme has continued to grow, including expansion to Luton through collaboration between our Civil and Defence teams. 

But the impact of a strong quality culture ultimately has to be visible in what we can deliver. A recent example is GKN Aerospace becoming the first company in the world to achieve Nadcap accreditation for Laser Wire Directed Energy Deposition (L-DED-w), an additive manufacturing process that uses a laser to melt metal wire and build up components layer by layer. The accreditation provides independent validation of the robust controls behind the manufacturing process.  

That matters because quality is what helps turn promising technology into repeatable industrial capability. GKN Aerospace has already designed, developed and delivered fully certified additively manufactured components that are flying today. The Nadcap accreditation provides a stronger foundation for moving further L-DED-w applications towards full aerospace and defence production.

It is a good illustration of what quality can enable: rigorous processes create repeatability, repeatability builds confidence, and that confidence helps move advanced technology from development into industrial production.

This World Quality Week, the theme is: “Quality: powering performance.” For GKN Aerospace, that connection is tangible: develop our people, strengthen our processes and create the confidence needed to deliver and industrialise the technologies our customers depend on.