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Within the aerospace industry there is a growing interest in evaluating and reducing the environmental impacts of products and related risks to business. Consequently, requests from governments, customers, manufacturers, and other interested stakeholders, for environmental information about aerospace products are becoming widespread. Presently, requests are inconsistent and this limits the ability of the aerospace industry to meet the informational needs of various stakeholders and reduce the environmental impacts of their products in a cost-effective manner. Energy consumption is a significant business cost, risk, and a simple proxy value for overall environmental impact. This paper presents the initial research carried out by an academic and industry consortium to develop standardised methods for calculating and reporting the embodied manufacturing energy content of aerospace products.

Manufacturing operations introduce unreliability into hardware that is not ordinarily accounted for by reliability design engineering efforts. Inspections and test procedures normally interwoven into fabrication processes are imperfect, and allow defects to escape which later result in field failures. Therefore, if the reliability that is designed and developed into an equipment/system is to be achieved, efforts must be applied during production to insure that reliability is built into the hardware. There are various ways to improve the reliability of a product. These include: Simplification Stress reduction/strength enhancement Design Improvement Using higher quality components Environmental Stress Screening before shipment Process Improvements, etc. This paper concentrates on ‘Manufacturing Process Improvement’ effort through the use of design of experiments, (DOE). Hence, improved levels of reliability can be achieved.

Ice adhesion on critical aircraft surfaces is a serious potential hazard that runs the risk of causing accidents. For this reason aircraft are equipped with active ice protection systems (AIPS). AIPS increase fuel consumption and add complexity to the aircraft systems. Reducing energy consumption of the AIPS or replacing the AIPS by a Passive Ice Protection System (PIPS), could significantly reduce aircraft fuel consumption. New coatings with superhydrophobic properties have been developed to reduce water adherence to surfaces. Superhydrophobic coatings can also reduce ice adhesion on surfaces and are used as icephobic coatings. The question is whether superhydrophobic or icephobic coatings would be able to reduce the cost associated with AIPS.

During its flight an aircraft can be struck by lightning and the induced high current will require a highly conductive airframe skin structure in order for it to propagate through with minimum damage. However an aircraft skin is generally coated with paint and the airframer does not always have control on the paint thickness. Paint thickness generates heightened concerns for lightning strike on aircraft, mainly because most of coatings dedicated to that purpose are non-conductive. Using insulating material or non-conductive coating with certain thickness may contribute to or increase damage inflicted by the swept stroke lightning energy, even on metallic structures Due to its high relative permittivity, a non-conductive paint or coating on a fuselage skin surface will contribute to slow down the lightning current propagation through structure. With this comes the risk of increasing heat that will favor structural damage and possible melt through.

The Safety Management System requires a structured Risk Management Process to be effective. In the technical fields where numerous potentially catastrophic risks exist, processes and procedures need to account not only for the hardware random failures but also of human errors. The technology has progressed to the point where the predominant safety risks are not so much the machine failures but that of the human interaction. Accidents are rarely the result of a single cause but of a number of latent contributing factors that when combined result in the accident. In the Aerospace industry, the operational risk to the fleet is assessed by the manufacturer and the operator independently and is used in safety and/or regulatory decision-making.

Aircraft systems are designed with reliability, safety and cost effectiveness in mind. The certification of the aircraft is based on tests and results of theoretical analyses that show the compliance with the FAR/JAR requirements. Monitoring for safety for in-service aircraft is an important, critical and extremely complex process. The ultimate objective is to assure that the safety level is equal to the original estimate or better. The manufacturer of the aircraft is particularly responsible for overall monitoring and assessment of all safety related events and corrective actions. Many different philosophies were adopted for this purpose. The safety monitoring and audit strategy is generally based on experience, engineering judgment, event analysis and numerical quantification by using probability theory and statistical tools. The aircraft sequential entry in the service and the aging of their components lead to the non-homogeneity of the fleet.