Quality Control Is Essential When Machining Aircraft Parts
Machining aircraft parts is an international industry, and in the U.S. it is strictly controlled by the FAA, OEM and Parts Manufacturer Approval. There are over 1,500 companies involved in the manufacturer of aircraft parts for commercial, military, and the private sector. Everything from regular service and required maintenance parts and kits, to the manufacturing of OEM replacement parts are needed on a regular basis by hundreds of public and private, airframe repair, service and fleet maintenance companies.
Aircraft parts for almost all commercial airplanes are made in factories owned by the top companies such as Honeywell, and Northrup Grumman. Many parts that are a high priority or commonly needed are most times outsourced to multiple small machine shops, and production companies. The manufacturing of parts are followed by a strict quality control process that dictates the machining tools used and the inspection process that must accompany each part of the manufacturing run. Aircraft preliminary design tools are used to ensure that all the parts have the correct dimensions.
Machining parts for the airplane industry is a high precision process that usually has all steps in the manufacturing done in a single facility. This includes the forging, forming, machining and finishing operations and ensures that they are all closely monitored for quality control. The high performance of the parts is usually more important than its wholesale price. Profits are only made when there is high quality production with low returns of defective and low quality parts which do not meet minimum quality standards. Only the best metal cutting tools are used to ensure high quality work.
To by pass the FAA requirement of staged testing and quality approval of new non-OEM replacement parts, many sub contractors will license their parts under the controlling OEM company to speed up the manufacturing process. This has the potential to put the OEM supplier at risk in the event of faulty or poor quality parts, but for the most part the quality control process is so refined that it is next to impossible for bad machining parts to get past the scrutiny of quality control inspectors.
Machining aircraft parts is typically broken down into sectors with different outsourcing contractors specializing in specific part lines such as avionics, landing gears assemblies and fuselage parts to name a few. The large OEM control the outsourcing of contracts for replacement parts and many of these small companies will in turn outsource the raw machining parts contracts to reduce their overheads and maximize the finishing process. Machining aircraft parts is a multi billion dollar industry that provides work for many thousands of smaller companies and their employees.
