Hybron co-founders Brennan Lieu and Aaron Guo, with the company's carbon fiber composite aircraft engine compressor blades. Source | Hybron 

Aerospace and defense manufacturing startup Hybron (El Segundo, Calif., U.S.) has announced the close of an oversubscribed $25 million seed round.

The company was founded originally under the name BladeX Technologies by co-founders Brennan Lieu (CEO) and Aaron Guo (CTO) while they were students at Stanford University and UC Berkeley, respectively. The founders, who were featured on Forbes’ 2026 30 under 30 list, aimed to produce carbon fiber composite aerospace parts at automotive speeds and significantly reduced costs, starting with a compressor blade for a fighter jet engine. The company says this blade is the world’s first to successfully operate at full power in a jet engine.

The startup was relaunched as Hybron in 2024 with the intention of expanding beyond blades to other dual-use aerospace and defense products including unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) airframes and munitions casings. 

Hybron says that its technology enables production of carbon fiber composite products at up to 100 times the speed and at a fraction of the cost of traditional composites manufacturing, by replacing a legacy process that takes hours or days with Hybron’s solution, which takes only minutes.

According to Veteran Ventures Capital, one of Hybron’s investors, the company’s hybrid chopped fiber polymer process enables complex parts to be manufactured at high speeds while maintaining the structural performance needed for aerospace and defense applications.

Today, Hybron has grown to 21 employees and operates a 5,000-square-foot California facility, where its technology is vertically integrated to produce tooling and material precursors in-house. Hybron also has a materials partnership and support from Hexcel (Stamford, Conn., U.S.). 

The capital from the seed round enables Hybron to scale its manufacturing, expand its team and execute a growing portfolio of programs. The company aims to transition from R&D to industrial production capacity, including a move to a larger facility in the near future.

The seed round was led by Marque Ventures, with participation from First In, DTX Ventures, Veteran Ventures Capital, Ultratech, Bravo Victor Venture Capital, Gaingels, ZEA, American Center for Manufacturing Innovation and notable angel investors including Matt Ocko.

“Modern aerospace and defense systems are still built around manufacturing processes that haven’t fundamentally changed in decades,” says Lieu. “Our goal is to make advanced composites manufacturable at industrial scale so critical systems can be built faster, lighter and more efficiently.”

Aerospace composite lamination tool production

3D printed composites lamination tool for aerospace production. Source (All Images) | Caracol

Formes et Volumes (Aytré, France) needed to produce large-scale composite tooling for the aerospace sector. Caracol delivered with a solution that combines robotic LFAM, polycarbonate + 20% carbon fiber material and hybrid manufacturing in a single, integrated workflow — and is already actively deployed within the customer’s industrial environment. Caracol’s manufacturing strategy included:

• Robotic LFAM to produce the near-net-shape geometry with precise robotic control and repeatable process parameters.
• CNC machining to deliver final dimensional accuracy and surface quality.
• Autoclave postprocessing to ensure thermal performance required for aerospace composite lamination.

The output is a fully monolithic, 3D printed structure (2,200 × 2,200 × 600 millimeters) with no assembly joints, improved structural integrity and long-term dimensional stability under demanding operating conditions, in addition to 50% reduction in lead time; 30% reduction in production costs; 50% reduction in material waste; and 50% reduction in part weight.

The bottom line? Rather than using traditional tooling production processes — constrained by slow, complex processes like multi-part assemblies and extensive CNC machining and compounded tolerance risks — robotic LFAM eliminates assembly steps, reduces cumulative tolerances and unlocks design freedom.

Read the complete case study.

Full-scale seaglider mock-up

Heron AM was also integrated by customer Proto21 (Dubai, UAE) in the production of the “world’s largest 3D printed aviation mock-up,” a 16-meter-long seaglider unveiled at the Dubai Airshow. Produced for REGENT Craft (North Kingstown, R.I., U.S.) the project resulted in a walk-through 1:1 mock-up with full interiors, produced in just 3 months.

Seaglider mock-up, on display at the Dubai Airshow.

Heron AM was adopted to produce the largest components, primarily the external shell of the structure. It enabled the rapid production of highly customized parts without the use of tooling or molds, while significantly minimizing manual intervention. In addition, the ability to manufacture large, monolithic sections reduced the total number of components, consequently lowering assembly complexity and time.

In total, 260 printers were deployed to manufacture more than 3,200 components — and 2.2 tons of polymer materials included glass fiber-reinforced rPETG and PLA — with approximately 23.5 cubic meters of printed volume. The project required around 29,600 hours of 3D printing, supported by dedicated engineering and assembly activities. It involved up to 70% reduction in lead time, 65% less waste and up to 45% cost savings compared to conventional production.

The bottom line? Additive manufacturing ecosystems can effectively accelerate industrial innovation at scale, on-demand and with faster development cycles and design freedom.

Read the complete case study.

Source | Airbus

Airbus (Toulouse, France) has completed the manufacturing and assembly of the first composite main deck cargo door for the A350F freighter at its facility in Illescas, Spain. The component has been delivered to the final assembly line (FAL) in Toulouse, where it will be integrated into the fuselage of the first test aircraft and undergo testing in the coming weeks. Airbus is manufacturing two A350F aircraft for flight testing from 2026-2027. 

The A350F main deck cargo door is reported to be the largest in the industry. Featuring a 4.3-meter-wide clear opening and a 3.15-meter-high clear opening, it is designed to make loading and unloading operations easier, faster and safer. Located in the rear fuselage to maintain an optimal center of gravity during loading, the door is made from composite materials and features an electrical open/close actuation system. 

The Airbus plant in Illescas is one of the company’s leading centers for the manufacturing of large-scale, complex composite surfaces (read about it in CW’s plant tour). It manufactures the skins and assembles the door before it is delivered for its integration into the fuselage. 

As part of the pre-series production process, the main deck cargo doors will be installed in Toulouse. Once serial production starts, the main deck cargo door will be delivered from Illescas to Hamburg, Germany, for integration into the aft fuselage and for installation of the actuation systems. From there, that section of the fuselage will be transported to the FAL in Toulouse following the Airbus production process.

“Delivering the main deck cargo door is the result of years of preparation and extensive teamwork, showcasing the deep expertise and technical maturity that the Illescas plant has refined over decades in composite materials,” says Ricardo Rojas, president of Airbus’ Commercial Aircraft business in Spain.

The A350F cargo aircraft is designed to meet global air freight market’s evolving demands. It has a range capability of up to 8,700 kilometrers with and a payload of up to 111 tonnes, enabling operators to deploy it on international long-haul routes. Made of more than 70% advanced materials — including the horizontal stabilizer and wingset — the A350F is 46 tonnes lighter than competitors. 

Powered by Rolls-Royce (London, U.K.) Trent XWB-97 engines, the aircraft will bring fuel consumption and carbon emissions reduction of up to 20% when compared to previous-generation aircraft with a similar payload-range capability. The A350F also fully meets ICAO’s 2027 CO_₂ emission standards. The aircraft will be able to operate with up to 50% sustaianable aviation fuel (SAF) at entry-to-service, with the aim for 100% capability by 2030, as with all Airbus aircraft. 

AkzoNobel’s latest evolution of its Aerofleet Coatings Management solution introduces a new drone-based inspection tool.
Source | AkzoNobel

AkzoNobel Aerospace Coatings is unveiling the latest evolution of its Aerofleet Coatings introducing new drone-enabled inspection capabilities that provide faster, more consistent and data-rich insights to help airlines optimize coating maintenance across their fleets.

Aerofleet Coatings Management is a digital, data-driven solution to support predictive maintenance. It helps airlines and operators determine precisely when an aircraft needs to be repainted and allows them to move beyond traditional time- or usage-based schedules.

The latest evolution introduces a new drone-based inspection tool, developed in partnership with Donecle: the Iris CMX (Coatings Management eXpert). This drone is capable of directly measuring coating performance using a 3-in-1 contact-based sensor capturing precise, quantitative data for dry film thickness, color data and gloss measurements to bring a new level of accuracy, consistency and repeatability to coating inspections.

With the addition of Iris CMX, Aerofleet Coatings Management now brings together three core data inputs to provide a comprehensive view of coating performance:

• Flight and environmental data, such as route profiles, UV exposure and humidity
• Full-surface visual analysis from the Iris GVI drone
• Targeted, high-precision measurement from the Iris CMX.

Together, these data streams enable a more accurate understanding of coating condition, helping operators to optimize maintenance planning across the fleet.

In addition to in-service inspections, the Iris CMX can be utilized for quality control during the OEM production and MRO processes. Its precise, repeatable measurements of coating thickness, color and gloss at key application stages promote coatings that meet specifications from the outset, reducing the likelihood of rework and unnecessary application.

The two drone systems together combine full-surface visual analysis with targeted, high-precision measurement of coating performance to provide both qualitative and quantitative insight into coating condition.

The two drone systems can be operated simultaneously, one on each side of the aircraft, by a trained team, who can complete a full inspection of a narrowbody aircraft in approximately 30 minutes.

Inspection training is provided by AkzoNobel Aerospace Coatings and Donecle specialists, allowing customers to collect data that feeds into a central database, creating a continuously evolving picture of the fleet over time.

First launched in 2023, Aerofleet Coatings Management was designed with a clear development roadmap to incorporate more advanced inspection capabilities over time. The introduction of Iris CMX represents a significant step forward in that vision, explains Michael Green, segment business services manager at AkzoNobel Aerospace Coatings, “Aerofleet Coatings Management has always been about giving airlines greater confidence in when and why they maintain or repaint their aircraft. From the outset, we had a clear roadmap to improve the service with more advanced measurement capabilities. The addition of the Iris CMX brings precise, consistent measurement into the process to strengthen the data that underpins our predictive models. It also allows us to support expert assessment with more objective, consistent and repeatable inspections, while improving the speed and efficiency of the inspection process.”

Well-suited for fleets of 100 aircraft or more, the service supports airlines in reducing unnecessary repainting, lowering maintenance costs and increasing aircraft availability. Over time, this contributes to both improved operational efficiency and reduced environmental impact.

Aerofleet Coatings Management forms part of AkzoNobel Aerospace Business Solutions, a suite of services designed to support customers with data-driven insights, technical expertise and operational efficiency.

Aerofleet Coatings Management forms part of AkzoNobel Aerospace Business Solutions. It was created as a digital, data-driven solution to support predictive maintenance, helping airlines and operators determine precisely when an aircraft needs to be repainted, enabling them to move beyond traditional time- or usage-based schedules. Ideally suited for fleets of 100 aircraft or more, the service supports airlines in reducing unnecessary repainting, lowering maintenance costs and increasing aircraft availability. 

AkzoNobel’s drone-based inspection tool, the Iris coatings management eXpert (CMX), developed in partnership with Donecle (Toulouse, France), is capable of directly measuring coating performance using a three-in-one, contact-based sensor that captures precise, quantitative data for dry film thickness, color data and gloss measurements. 

With the addition of Iris CMX, Aerofleet Coatings Management now brings together three core data inputs to provide a comprehensive view of coating performance: Flight and environmental data, such as route profiles, UV exposure and humidity; full-surface visual analysis from the Iris GVI drone; and targeted, high-precision measurement from the Iris CMX. Together, these data streams enable a more accurate understanding of coating condition, helping operators to optimize maintenance planning across the fleet.

In addition to in-service inspections, the Iris CMX can be used for quality control during OEM production and maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) processes. Its precise, repeatable measurements at key application stages ensure coatings meet specifications from the outset, reducing the likelihood of rework and unnecessary application.

Together, the Iris CMX and Iris GVI drone systems combine full-surface visual analysis with targeted, high-precision measurement of coating performance to provide both qualitative and quantitative insight into coating conditions. The systems can be operated simultaneously, one on each side of the aircraft, by a trained team, who can complete a full inspection of a narrowbody aircraft in approximately 30 min.

Inspection training is provided by AkzoNobel Aerospace Coatings and Donecle specialists, creating a continuously evolving picture of the fleet over time.

Aerofleet Coatings Management forms part of AkzoNobel Aerospace Business Solutions, a suite of services designed to support customers with data-driven insights, technical expertise and operational efficiency.

Source | Albany Engineered Composites

Albany Engineered Composites (AEC, Portsmouth, N.H., U.S.), a segment of Albany International Corp. (NYSE: AIN), has received a long-term contract from Pratt & Whitney (East Hartford, Conn., U.S.), an RTX business, to produce composite structural engine components for the commercial aviation Pratt & Whitney GTF engine.

“This award reflects AEC’s ability to deliver high-volume, high-precision composite structures with consistency and excellence,” says Chris Stone, president of AEC. “It marks a major milestone in our relationship and underscores the strength of our operational performance, our technology and our people.”

The award marks AEC’s first volume production program with Pratt & Whitney and expands the company’s portfolio of complex composite engine structures for the aerospace industry.

“Our strategy is simple: perform for Pratt & Whitney and grow,” adds Jeff Daniel, vice president of the commercial segment at AEC.

Source | China Daily flight video

Chinese researchers and industry collaborators have successfully developed and flown a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a significant portion of its structure made from bamboo-based composite materials.

According to the China Daily, the tilt-rotor drone, with more than 25% of its structure made from bamboo-based composite materials, completed its maiden flight in Tianjin and is “the first fixed-wing UAV globally to use bamboo at that scale.” The aircraft has a wingspan of more than 2.5 meters, weighs about 7 kilograms, is capable of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL), can cruise above 100 kilometers/hour and has an endurance of more than 1 hour.

The China Daily and JEC Composites both highlight material advantages: bamboo makes the UAV more than 20% lighter than similar aircraft built with carbon fiber, and the bamboo composite’s cost is reported as about one-quarter that of standard carbon fiber cloth.

The UAV was co-developed by the International Centre of Bamboo and Rattan, Beihang University’s Ningbo Institute of Technology and Long Bamboo Technology Group.

This news is an excerpt. Read the complete article on JEC Composites.

Source | Bell Textron Inc.

Bell Textron Inc. (Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.), a Textron Inc. company, has opened a Wichita Assembly Center (WAC) for the MV-75 Cheyenne (formerly the V-280 Valor) fuselage assembly in Kansas. Bell began fuselage manufacturing operations at the facility in October 2025, as a part of the acceleration initiative directed by the U.S. Army.

“Wichita has deep roots in aviation and defense, and Bell Textron’s presence in the community will further strengthen that legacy,” says Sen. Jerry Moran. 

In addition to manufacturing the MV-75 fuselage at the WAC, work is ongoing at several of Bell’s other advanced manufacturing facilities in Texas, including Bell’s Advanced Composite Center in Fort Worth, and final assembly in Amarillo.

"As Bell moves through the assembly of the MV-75 test aircraft and into accelerated production, we are committed to investing in advanced manufacturing to ensure we deliver high performance at an affordable cost to our customer,” says Danny Maldonado, president and CEO, Bell. 

The first operational U.S. Navy MQ-25A Stingray soars over southern Illinois during a successful 2-hour first flight on April 25. Source | Boeing/Eric Shindelbower

Boeing (Arlington, Va., U.S.) and the U.S. Navy successfully completed the first test flight of an operational MQ-25A Stingray. The milestone advances the composites-intensive aircraft closer to aircraft carrier operations.

During the 2-hour flight, the unmanned aircraft successfully demonstrated its ability to autonomously taxi, take off, fly, land and respond to commands from the Unmanned Carrier Aviation Mission Control System MD-5 Ground Control Station (GCS). Boeing and U.S. Navy air vehicle pilots facilitated the mission by sending the aircraft commands and then monitored its performance from the GCS at MidAmerica St. Louis Airport in Mascoutah, Illinois, where the program is based. Once airborne, the Stingray executed a pre-determined mission plan that validated its flight controls, navigation and safe integration with the GCS.

“The successful flight builds on years of learning from our MQ-25A T1 prototype and represents a major maturation of the program,” says Dan Gillian, vice president and general manager, Boeing Air Dominance. “The MQ-25A is the most complex autonomous system ever developed for the carrier environment, and this historic achievement advances us closer to safely integrating the Stingray into the carrier air wing.”

The MQ-25A is the Navy’s gateway to integrating unmanned aircraft on the carrier deck, enabling manned-unmanned teaming. Its autonomous aerial refueling capability will extend the operational range of the carrier air wing and enable F/A-18 Super Hornets currently performing the aerial refueling role to focus on their primary role as a multi-role strike fighter.

The aircraft is the first of four Engineering Development Model aircraft that will be delivered to the Navy under the original $805 million engineering and manufacturing development contract.

Boeing and the Navy will conduct additional test flights out of MidAmerica St. Louis Airport to further validate the aircraft’s flight controls and capabilities before transitioning to Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland, to prepare for carrier qualifications.

Co-consolidated integral CF/LMPAEK flanges form a continuous thermoplastic material system with the tube body, eliminating the metallic hardware and adhesive interfaces that conventional cryogenic line assemblies require. Source (All Images) | herone GmbH

Hydrogen (H₂) gas liquefies at a temperature of -253°C (20.28 K) under atmospheric pressure, just 20 degrees above absolute zero. This temperature is cold enough to make most structural materials brittle and H₂, among the smallest molecules that exist, are small enough to find any gap in a material and permeate straight through. For ground-based cryogenic infrastructure, those challenges are manageable: stainless steel and vacuum-jacketed lines are bulky and heavy, but when weight is not a constraint, they’re acceptable. 

Put those same requirements into a commercial aircraft and the equation changes entirely. A liquid hydrogen (LH₂) fuel cell-powered passenger aircraft must route LH₂ from the tank to the fuel cell through a fuel distribution system light enough to be viable, while surviving more than 10,000 thermal cycles over a 25-year service life, with each flight heating everything back to ambient before the next cryogenic soak begins. NASA (Hampton, Va., U.S.) research has shown that without adequate insulation, 50-70% of LH₂ can boil off in flight, a figure that makes H₂ aviation commercially unworkable if the fuel system is not designed correctly from the outset.

Conventional metallic cryogenic lines accommodate thermal contraction from this thermal cycling with bellows, O-rings, bolted flanges and mechanical seals; components that also multiply the number of potential leak points in the system. In a ground application, leaks are not desirable, but H₂ will rise and diffuse quickly in air, for example. In an occupied aircraft carrying a cryogenic, highly flammable fuel, every joint is a liability that both the designer and the regulator have to account for. The conventional metallic approach, borrowed from industrial cryo-technology, simply was not built with that constraint in mind.

Foundational TPC cryogenic design

Dresden-based herone GmbH (Germany) has spent the last several years re-engineering the design of cryogenic fluid lines from first principles, specifically for the aerospace operating environment, within the German government-funded LuFo projects WAKOS and ZEDI.

The company, founded in 2018 as a spin-off from TU Dresden’s Institute of Lightweight Engineering and Polymer Technology (ILK), has built its technology on a decade of research into thermoplastic composite (TPC) hollow profiles originating from co-founder Dr. Christian Garthaus and Dr. Daniel Barfuss’ doctoral work at ILK. That foundation produced herone’s patented continuous blow molding and injection forming processes, in the context of unitized thermoplastic driveshaft and gear demonstrators. The company focuses on carbon fiber-reinforced low-melt polyaryletherketone (CF/LMPAEK; LMPAEK is from Victrex, Clevelys, U.K.) and polyetheretherketone (PEEK) composite hollow profiles, creating a material system that offers 50-60% weight savings over stainless steel and a set of physical properties that make it unusually well suited to the demands of cryogenic H₂ applications. This material focus is the foundation of the company’s LH₂ fuel line system design.

A full-scale CF/LMPAEK cryogenic line component produced for a space application demonstrates herone's out-of-autoclave (OOA) braiding and consolidation process at flight hardware scale.

That foundation has already produced flight hardware. Working with ArianeGroup GmbH (Bremen Germany) within the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Future Launchers Preparatory Programme (FLPP), herone recently completed the first full-scale CF/LMPAEK cryogenic line system component for the Ariane 6 launch vehicle with a near-net-shape, tape-preformed, out-of-autoclave (OOA)-consolidated assembly with integral thermoplastic fittings co-consolidated with the tubing in a single step, designed for the pressure loads and cryogenic conditions of launch vehicle service. This space application demands minimized mass above all else, and accepts a single-wall line design where brief mission durations and overboard venting manage any residual leakage risk. 

Aviation, by contrast, demands something considerably harder to achieve: a double-wall system with vacuum insulation, secondary containment and leak rates low enough to be safe in an occupied vehicle over thousands of flight cycles. The Ariane 6 component demonstrates the manufacturing process works at full scale; the aviation program is where the engineering requirements become genuinely uncharted.

Thermoplastic vs. thermoset matrix choice

To understand herone’s approach, it helps to think about what happens to a composite material during repeated cryogenic cycling. Epoxy-based thermoset composites behave, in a sense, like glass under those conditions: rigid and capable in normal service, but at temperatures approaching cryogenic (below -150°C), the brittleness latent in the material becomes structural. Under thermal cycling, matrix microcracking can initiate and propagate through the laminate. Each crack is a potential H₂ leakage pathway, not because the laminate has failed structurally, but because H₂’s molecular diameter is small enough to migrate through cracks that many structural assessments would dismiss as negligible.

The PAEK family of thermoplastics behave differently. “Think of them as the flexible polymer bottle rather than the glass bottle. They retain ductility at cryogenic extremes that thermosets lose,” explains Daniel Barfuss, co-founder and managing partner at herone. “When things get really cold, almost all materials become more fragile, and we need materials to be flexible enough to prevent tiny cracks which can lead to leaks. That’s why thermoplastics are valuable here.”

PEEK maintains approximately 3-4% elongation at break at -196°C (77 K) — the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (LN₂) and the standard temperature used in cryogenic materials characterization, representing a conservative proxy for the -253°C LH₂ service condition — compared to roughly 1.5% for glass fiber/epoxy systems. The standard cryogenic test temperature of 77 K is used in materials characterization because that cryogen is readily available in any laboratory, making it a practical and reproducible initial benchmark for assessing how materials behave, even when the actual service temperature, as in LH₂ applications, is colder still at -253°C.

The retained flexibility that PAEK polymers offer is the difference between a laminate that resists microcracking under thermal fatigue and one that does not. TPC in general also demonstrate significantly higher mode I interlaminar fracture toughness — the energy per unit area required to pry two bonded composite plies apart by opening them like a book — approximately five times greater than thermoset composites. As such, cracks not only initiate less readily, but require substantially more energy to propagate once they do.

Comparative micrograph analysis of thermoset CFRP (left) and CF/LMPAEK laminate (right) after cryogenic thermal cycling demonstrates the thermoplastic matrix’s resistance to the microcracking.

Permeation is a separate but related problem. Even without cracking, H₂ diffuses through composite laminates under a concentration gradient. CF/LMPAEK laminates provide approximately 10 times lower H₂ permeability than epoxy systems at cryogenic temperatures, and at the -253°C of LH₂ service, permeation through the composite wall itself becomes negligible. The critical window is at ambient temperature during ground handling, refueling and warm-up phases, where a barrier layer is still required. 

Rather than applying a liner as a secondary postprocess step, herone integrates a metallic film permeation barrier directly between braided layers during preforming. The thermoplastic-functionalized barrier layer becomes part of the tube wall, co-processed into the structure, maintaining the homogeneity of the composite cross-section and avoiding the bonded interface that a separately applied liner creates. 

“When you use a high-quality thermoplastic and achieve a good molding surface, you get a resin-rich outer layer with no exposed fibers,” says Barfuss. “That surface seals. You don't need metal to do it, you just need resin. That's one of the things people don't expect thermoplastics to be able to do.”

Eliminating the joints

The materials herone has chosen resolve the key microcracking and permeation problems, but the deeper engineering question is structural: How do you build a cryogenic aircraft fuel line without the bellows, O-rings and bolted flanges that make conventional metallic assemblies so joint-heavy?

Integral CF/LMPAEK flanges co-consolidated with the tube body in a single press cycle reduce joint count and system mass while maintaining a homogeneous thermoplastic material system throughout the assembly.

The answer lies in what PAEK TPC enable at the manufacturing level that thermoset composites do not. Because TPC can be reheated and reformed after initial consolidation, herone injection-forms or co-consolidates functional elements (flanges, fittings, ferrules, sealing surfaces) directly onto the composite tube body in a single integrated manufacturing sequence. Short fiber-reinforced PEEK is co-consolidated at 380°C with preheated PAEK preforms held at approximately 200°C, creating simultaneous cohesive molecular bonding at the polymer interface and geometric interlocking at the macro-scale. This produces what herone terms a “form-locking joint” — a connection that achieves 44% higher torque load capacity than cohesive bonding alone, without adhesives, fasteners or elastomeric seals. The flange is not attached to the tube; it is the tube, formed from the same material system and bonded at the molecular level.

“The co-consolidation is a technique that eliminates the need for postprocessing joining operations and additional joining specifications, such as knock-downs,” says Barfuss. “This process is inherently integrated into the fundamental consolidation specifications of the composite material itself. As a result, co-consolidation achieves shear design values that are three to four times greater compared to traditional metallic-composite adhesive bonding methods.”

For an aviation LH₂ application, herone is developing a double-wall configuration: a composite inner tube carrying the LH₂, separated from a composite outer containment tube by a vacuum-insulated annular gap maintained by 3D printed polymer spacers. The vacuum interspace provides thermal insulation which is critical to minimizing boil-off over flights lasting up to 5 hours and simultaneously acts as secondary containment if the inner line develops a leak. An interspace monitoring capability provides early detection before any failure cascades to the outer wall. 

By designing both walls from the same CF/LMPAEK material system and braiding each with independent laminate layups, herone independently tunes the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) of each tube. A near-zero axial CTE laminate on the inner tube suppresses axial contraction during cooldown. A matched CTE design between inner and outer walls removes the differential movement that conventional lines manage with bellows. Eliminating bellows reduces the joint count, system weight and the potential leak-point inventory simultaneously.

Braiding to functional assembly

The company’s manufacturing sequence begins with automated tape braiding. Victrex tape AE250 supplied in LMPAEK-matrix form with PAEK-compatible sizing that delivers 20% higher fiber-matrix adhesion than unsized fibers, are braided over a mandrel by a robotic system that controls feed rate, braid angle and layer sequence. Braid angles from ±15° to 70° are selectable as well as pure 0° layer integration, enabling the laminate architecture to be tuned for each application — including specific multi-axial angles for CTE management and higher helical angles for hoop-stress capacity under internal pressure. For curved sections, the mandrel geometry routes the tube through bends with radii more than twice the diameter without fiber wrinkling, a direct advantage of the TPC tape architecture over dry fiber braiding that must be consolidated separately.

Robotic tape braiding deposits fully impregnated CF/LMPAEK tapes at controlled braid angles onto a mandrel, producing a net-shape hollow preform ready for bladder-assisted consolidation without intermediate processing steps.

Following the completion of the braided preform, including the metallic barrier film positioned between designated laminate layers at this stage, the assembly transfers to a heated press. An internal inflatable bladder inserted through the tube bore applies radial consolidation pressure from inside the preform against the tool face while the  press assembly heats to processing temperature: 305-340°C for plies of carbon fiber-reinforced prepreg made with LMPAEK polymer 385°C for PEEK. This OOA consolidation produces void content below 2% in approximately 15 minutes, compared to 240 minutes for autoclave-cured thermoset prepregs. 

The company’s Dresden facility, representing more than €4 million in production investment, targets 20,000 parts annually, and that throughput only makes sense at 15-minute consolidation cycles. The metallic barrier film is positioned between braided layers before consolidation and thermally fused into the finished wall during the same press cycle, requiring no separate process step.

For field assembly, herone has also developed a PEEK-based electrofusion socket system: a resistance-heating element embedded in a thermoplastic sleeve heats the joint to fusion temperature when energized, welding two line sections together on-site without additional tooling or external heat sources. 

“We’ve developed a joining approach that works like plumbing,” says Barfuss. “You bring the socket to the site, clip on a simple electrical connection, and the heat does the rest. No tooling, no external press; the joint fuses in place.”

This concept brings the simplicity of established plumbing-industry joining techniques to enable reliable fusing of pipe sections to an aerospace-grade composite cryogenic line.

Making a case for CF/LMPAEK in aerospace programs

Micrograph analysis of CF/LMPAEK laminate specimens subjected to extended cryogenic thermal cycling shows no measurable microcracking in either flat coupons or tubular geometry. This represents the critical distinction from thermoset composite test results under equivalent conditions. Permeation measurements on cycled and uncycled specimens confirm that barrier-integrated laminates meet aviation LH₂ service requirements. The material system carries qualification data from broader aerospace programs under PAEK-class material approvals (see sidebar), and herone holds AS/EN9100 manufacturing certification. 

Cross-section micrograph of a CF/LMPAEK tube wall shows the metallic permeation barrier layer thermally fused between laminate plies during consolidation, with no adhesive interface.

Compared to aerospace-grade stainless steel, the CF/LMPAEK tape-braided tube assembly is projected to reduce line system weight by 50-60%. Additional savings from integral CF/LMPAEK flanges displace separate metallic flange hardware, as flanges account for roughly one-third of a metallic line assembly’s total mass.

The technology currently sits at technology readiness level (TRL) 3 for the aviation double-wall configuration, with TRL 6 targeted within the coming year. No established certification standards yet exist specifically for LH₂ piping in passenger aircraft; EASA CS-25 specifications are being adapted, and the FAA’s December 2024 Hydrogen-Fueled Aircraft Roadmap sets development targets through 2028 and 2032. Nonetheless, the failure behavior of herone’s CF/LMPAEK-based tube assemblies aligns well with the regulatory intent of those frameworks. Unlike metallic lines that can fail suddenly under overpressure, the TPC tubes fail first in the polymer matrix, producing slow localized leakage detectable through the interspace monitoring system before any structural event occurs. That failure-mode predictability is an engineering argument for CF/LMPAEK as much as a safety one.

The design’s thermoplastic matrix also closes the sustainability case. Because LMPAEK can be remelted, production off-cuts and end-of-life components can be reprocessed into chopped TPC feedstock, avoiding the landfill destination typical for thermoset composite scrap. For an industry beginning to treat circular economy obligations as genuine design constraints rather than compliance exercises, that reprocessability matters.

“We’re not just replacing metal with composites,” Barfuss notes. “We’re creating a system that aviation’s H₂ infrastructure can actually qualify, maintain and eventually recycle, and doing it in a way that can be manufactured at the rates the industry will eventually need.”

Ceratizit provides advanced milling systems designed to provide process security, longer tool life and improved productivity when machining materials such as hardened steels, refractory metals, tungsten, molybdenum, titanium, Inconel and other heat-resistant superalloys (HRSAs).

Ceratizit’s MaxiMill – 211-DC indexable milling system is designed specifically for process-secure milling of HRSAs and titanium. The cutter uses DirectCooling technology, which provides coolant precisely to the insert flank where heat generation is highest. The cutter body is produced using additive manufacturing, enabling complex internal coolant channels that cannot be produced with conventional methods. This design improves heat management and tool life while providing higher cutting parameters in materials with low thermal conductivity.

The MaxiMill 211 – KN indexable-insert porcupine cutter uses a 15-mm insert platform optimized for stable shoulder- and slot-milling operations in hardened steels and high-strength aerospace alloys. With positive insert geometry that reduces cutting forces and vibration, the cutter can perform a range of operations from roughing through semi-finishing which reduces tool changes when machining complex aerospace components.

For high-efficiency material removal, Ceratizit’s MaxiMill – HFC high-feed milling system is available with 12-mm and 19-mm inserts. The system’s high-feed geometry directs cutting forces axially into the spindle, lowering spindle load and vibration while maintaining high metal removal rates. The design enables aerospace manufacturers to reduce cycle times when machining large structural or engine components while maintaining stable machining conditions.

Robotic lamination direct push. Source | Cevotec GmbH

Robotic lamination techniques are emerging as a critical enabler for increasing automated layup rates of complex composite aerostructures that conventional automation cannot address. Cevotec (Munich, Germany) highlights its Samba systems and new Samba Step Retrofit Kit, which extend fiber patch placement (FPP)-based robotic lamination into geometries traditionally left to manual layup, enhancing production control and repeatability.

Automated layup processes like automated fiber placement (AFP) have grown over decades, but many mid-sized aerospace composite parts with tight radii, double curvatures and varied material requirements remain manual due to tooling access and process limitations. These constraints result in layup rates that scale with skilled labor rather than automation.

Cevotec proves that robotic lamination based on FPP technology enables controlled placement on challenging surfaces where AFP and traditional heads struggle, including concave sections and transition zones that require continuous contact and compaction. By adapting placement strategies — such as direct pushing, rolling motion and multi push-and-roll — robots are able to conform patches accurately to complex geometry, improving consistency and process repeatability.

Cevotec’s Samba production systems execute these placement strategies, integrating into existing shop floor environments using standard robot cells and media while supporting repeatable layup processes on previously manual features.

The Samba Step Retrofit Kit

To extend robotic lamination capabilities to existing robot installations, Cevotec has launched the Step Retrofit Kit. The kit equips shopfloor robots with FPP-based lamination capability and consists of the cevoGripper end effector for precise fiber handling, the cevoVision machine-vision quality control system and machine control via Samba_OS integrated with Artist Studio programming software.

The cevoGripper adapts to part geometry for conformable placement, while cevoVision ensures dimensional and positional validation of patches before layup. Samba_OS and Artist Studio provide an integrated workflow from design to automated program generation, enabling retrofitted cells to access placement features aligned to their configuration.

The retrofit concept’s modular design allows manufacturers to introduce automation in phases, matching technical capability and investment to production needs, and supports further extensions such as material feeding or extended reach solutions.

Cevotec goes into more depth on the robotic lamination stop-gap at its website.

Source: Colibrium

Colibrium Additive, a GE Aerospace company, has been awarded a contract by NAVAIR in support of its Additive Manufacturing Capability initiative, which aims to enable expedited testing, qualification and certification of metal additively manufactured parts and improve the U.S. Navy’s operational readiness.

Under that agreement, Colibrium Additive will deliver six metal alloy Material Process Combinations (MPCs) which are the detailed metal alloy’s physical and mechanical property data; optimize process parameters; consolidate material and process specifications; and establish design allowables for the properties tested.

This includes expanding the existing AlSi7Mg and IN718 packages, and adding 17-4PH and 7050-RAM2 to the current portfolio of 316L, CoCr and Ti64. A dedicated thin-wall fatigue characterization will help validate the performance and fatigue life of thin-wall geometries, supporting the qualification and certification of additively manufactured structures for aviation use.

Under the agreement, and to meet NAVAIR required development timelines, Colibrium Additive will also deliver three M Line metal 3D printing systems and one M2 Series 5 printer required to support the MPC development effort, and a comprehensive Addworks services package is also included. This package includes licensed material characterization/data curves, manufacturing process instructions and select specifications to support the additive manufacture of NAVAIR components, as well as a training program to enable repeatable production of airworthy parts.

Together, these elements are intended to shorten lead times for critical components, improve fleet sustainment and enhance overall naval aviation readiness.

The program also includes a comprehensive training plan for teams in manufacturing, quality, design and materials, as well as for machine operators, to build enduring in-house capability.

“Colibrium Additive is proud to extend its support of NAVAIR with proven metal additive technology and deep application expertise,” says Lars Bruns, executive technology leader at Colibrium Additive. “By combining certified hardware with licensed process data and hands-on training, we are helping accelerate the Navy’s ability to produce repeatable, airworthy components at scale and reduce supply chain risk for critical aviation parts.”

Fabrum has developed lightweight composite liquid hydrogen (LH₂) tanks for zero-emissions aviation and demonstrated fast filling with <5 watts of heat leak. Source | Fabrum

The development of composite tanks to store liquid hydrogen (LH₂) continues, with multiple projects presented at JEC World 2026 but no less than 22 projects listed in a recent CW report on carbon fiber and composites in H₂ storage, including LeiWaCo, COCOLIH2T, H2ELIOS, OVERLEAF, PHOEBUS, fLHYing Tank, Lufo UpLift and many more.

In late 2025, Fabrum (Christchurch, New Zealand) successfully demonstrated rapid refilling of its composite tanks to store liquid hydrogen (LH₂) with <5 watts of heat leak, meeting industry requirements. The refueling was successfully completed at Fabrum’s dedicated LH₂ test facility at Christchurch Airport. This blog is based on my interview with Hugh Reynolds, co-founder and technical director at Fabrum, to better understand the company’s developments in composite LH₂ tanks and its outlook for carbon fiber and composites in these tanks.

From composites to superconductivity to LH₂ systems

Fabrum describes itself as a development and manufacturing company. “That gives us a wide range of applications that cross pollinate and allows us to learn, transpose and test new technologies,” says Reynolds.

Trained as a mechanical engineer, he spent years in metal and composites manufacturing before co-founding Fabrum to work on superconductivity applications. “The very cold liquids and materials these systems use require non-conducting containment, typically a vacuum flask like what is used in a thermos, except it must be nonmagnetic, sealed and withstand the pressures involved,” he explains.

The company spent 15 years working with composite equipment for superconductivity, including building one of the world’s first superconducting transformers in collaboration with the University of Canterbury (Christchurch, New Zealand). “We learned a lot about how porous composites can be if they’re not made properly, and even if they are made reasonably well,” notes Reynolds. “A lot of the techniques we’ve developed came out of that work.”

“And then, just prior to COVID, when people were starting to look at H₂ for alternative fuel and energy systems,” he continues, “we realized that our technology could also be used to make lightweight LH₂ tanks for aircraft. We also developed the cryogenic cooling systems for liquifying H₂.” Fabrum approached several companies with proposals that included supplying the whole fuel system, including a small H₂ liquefaction system, distribution system, onboard composite storage tank and LH₂ delivery to the fuel cell. “And in the process of working through that,” says Reynolds, “we realized that there was a lot of discussion about how you could do this but at that time, 6-7 years ago, almost nobody was actually doing it yet.”

Fabrum was then approached by an Australian mining company. “They wanted to decarbonize and had a very ambitious project to run megawatt-scale fuel cells on LH₂,” he explains. “That gave us a wonderful opportunity to make all of this work in a real-world industrial application.” The resulting storage system was a more traditional metal dewar construction and very large — 10,000 liters. “Part of the reason it was metal was to resist damage during service,” says Reynolds. “The tray is loaded with 250 tons of rock, and the possibility of damage to the outer skin of the tank is significant because it sits between the truck’s wheels under the tray. So, we made the outer skin from 10-millimeter-thick medium tensile steel.”

Challenge of first composite tanks for LH₂, triple skin for fast fill

Fabrum’s history is essential to understand where the company is today, he notes. “If you don't have a need for this technology, then you don't spend time developing it. The true commercial desire for H₂-powered aircraft is only about 5 years old. So, if you started down the path to develop a composite LH₂ tank 5 years ago, you've only got 5 years of experience. But we've been doing it for 20 years because we wanted exactly the same technology for our superconductors.”

It isn’t surprising, then, that Fabrum was the first to demonstrate a fully functioning composite LH₂ tank. “There were some traditional metal LH₂ tanks for mobility and perhaps some small-scale tests that showed a composite tank could hold LH₂, but we’re the only company or organization that I know of that's actually demonstrated a full composite tank with fuel delivery system that can actually operate on a continuous basis.”

Fabrum had to overcome major challenges, including thermal shock, H₂ leak tightness and vacuum leak tightness, explains Reynolds, “where you don't want the vacuum [in the space between the tanks] to decay. And then you have to be able to build such a system and make it affordable.”

“The one thing we didn't have already was the ability to do a fast fill,” he continues. After identifying the issues involved, Fabrum proceeded with a solution that resulted in its patented triple skin design. “We have a liquid containment vessel inside the pressure vessel made from a particular construction to handle the thermal shock during fast filling,” explains Reynolds. “But that containment vessel doesn't have to handle the pressure loads, and therefore you've decoupled liquid containment and thermal shock from pressure capability. That was key and also provides redundancy should any incident cause loss of  vacuum in the outer shell. You use vacuum there because it's the lightest weight, most effective insulation mechanism. But if that gets compromised, then you get a very high heat load onto your inner vessel, and the LH₂ is going to boil very rapidly.”

“The triple skin decouples that again and only 25% or less of the heat load gets into the LH₂, which means the rate we would have to vent in an emergency to prevent pressure buildup is substantially reduced. Our testing with LH₂ in real operating conditions shows that if you lost vacuum in flight, there's actually no issue with continuing to fly. That was a key milestone as we move toward certification of our systems for several drone and small aircraft.”

A custom-built Fabrum double-skin LH₂ composite tank (left) for AeroDelft in the Netherlands, sits alongside Fabrum’s existing double-skin (center) and triple-skin (right) LH₂ composite tanks. Source | Fabrum LinkedIn post

Composite LH₂ tanks without carbon fiber?

Fabrum has used carbon fiber, “but through our years of work with superconductive systems, we learned you've got to be very careful about system longevity,” he notes. “Carbon fiber’s high stiffness can cause matrix cracking during the cool down process for these cryogenic systems. So, we specifically design our laminates with other materials to avoid that problem.”

Fabrum’s tanks are fully composite with composite internal support structures, says Reynolds, “but use metal fittings and a special joining system that lets us connect them reliably to the composite. We’ve also developed some special manufacturing techniques, because if you can't build it economically, then it's not worth anything. These techniques provide very high vacuum tightness where we don't get leaks through the laminate. For example, carbon fiber is notorious for having voids down the fiber bundles. Because those bundles are so fine, getting resin into all of the thousands of tows is very challenging.” Instead, Fabrum uses glass fiber with epoxy resin in a particular way that has been proven to work over decades of development and refinement.

LH₂ tanks for aircraft must be composite and affordable

The fast fill operation demonstrated in late 2025 used a 180-liter tank sized to store 8-10 kilograms of LH₂. Fabrum has now designed two slightly larger wingtip tanks, each storing 10-20 kilograms, for a general aviation plane that seats up to six passengers. “This size of tank is what we're currently fitting to helicopters, vertical lift aircraft and autonomous aircraft,” says Reynolds. “We did a short study on the aircraft and found that if we use twin 20-liter tanks, by the time you account for reserve fuel allowance, we can get 1-1.5 hours of flight time.”

Compared to the systems it has developed for mining vehicles and ground applications, the tanks for aircraft are small. “But we’re using the same technology and learnings across these applications and already have the plans in place to convert the inner vessels of the mining system to composites, which will probably save about 1.5 tons of mass per storage vessel.”

For aircraft, notes Reynolds, composites are the only option precisely because of this weight savings. “We’ve already seen some European aerospace groups abandon their aluminum tank developments because the weight penalty is too high, and there is also a thermal penalty, while composites can be good insulators, depending on the materials and construction used.”

But are these composite LH₂ tanks really affordable? “They have to be,” says Reynolds. “We come from an industrial background and understand what our customers’ cost targets. We’re not trying to reinvent anything or use aerospace costing, and not using carbon fiber helps with that.”

Boil-off and dwell time

Key issues for all LH₂ tanks used for mobility are how to manage temperature and pressure during operation but also when vehicles sit idle. How do Fabrum’s composite LH₂ tanks compare in terms of boil-off and dwell time? “When they're being used and you're drawing the LH₂ fuel off, you don't have any issues because that boil-off energy is going out into the fuel cell or gas turbine and you can maintain pressure,” says Reynolds. “We tend to operate at design pressures of less than 12 bar. The issue for everybody is when you're not drawing fuel off but just sitting there. In that situation, you need our system’s very low heat leak.”

Fabrum has demonstrated a dwell or idle time of 20 hours for its composite tanks before a pressure is reached that requires venting of the boiled off H₂ gas. “But we expect that to reach 40-60 hours,” he says. “So much depends on the detailed design and what is actually required because tanks with a longer hold time could be undesirably heavy and/or costly.”

Another issue often discussed is the need to insulate all of the LH₂ fuel lines. “Regardless of whether you take liquid, gas or a mixture off the tank, you need to warm it up to the temperature required by the fuel cell,” says Reynolds. “So, the cryogenic H₂ has to go into a heat exchanger of some type and we always insulate the lines to that heat exchanger. For all of our commercial systems — including the mining applications — that insulation is fairly easy to achieve and while they're running, it stays above freezing point.”

Development timeline and certification

 

AMSL Aero’s Vertiia eVTOL (top) and Stralis Aircraft’s fuel cell propulsion retrofit for general aviation aircraft (bottom) are using LH₂ and Fabrum’s composite tanks to offer significantly longer range for zero emissions flight. Source | AMSL Aero, Stralis Aircraft

Fabrum expects to be flying three different aircraft with a composite LH₂ tank within the next 12 months. It’s working with AMSL Aero (Sydney, Australia) and its Vertiia H₂-electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft and with Stralis Aircraft (Brisbane, Australia), supplying the LH₂ fuel system for its H₂-electric propulsion being certified as a retrofit for the Beech Bonanza. “We have a couple of other partners, including a helicopter company, that are looking at converting to LH₂ from their compressed H₂ gas systems,” notes Reynolds.

The next step is small commuter aircraft with up to 19 seats, which requires a significant amount of work for certification, but much less than aircraft with 70-100 seats. “That’s why ZeroAvia and a lot of other companies developing H₂ propulsion and aircraft are working under 19 seats,” says Reynolds. “Actually, developing the LH₂ tank is only a small part of the work required to achieve certification. The majority is all the other parts of the systems, including the fuel cells, and you have to have multiple redundancies on everything. We've designed our tanks with the certification process in mind, and we’re also supplying the whole system. We build the tanks, the heat exchangers that warm the LH₂ and the system that supplies pressure- and temperature-controlled warm gas to the fuel cell or combustion engine. The customer is typically the integrator and looks after everything from the warm gas onwards.”

Source | Alliance for Zero-Emission Aviation

Reynolds believes the first step of certifying smaller aircraft can be achieved by 2030, which is in line with the “Roadmap for the deployment of hybrid, electric and hydrogen flights in Europe” published in April 2026 by the Alliance for Zero-Emission Aviation (AZEA), which has more than 200 members including Airbus, Aciturri, Aernnova, Daher Aerospace, GKN Aerospace, IATA, Leonardo, MTU, Rolls-Royce, Safran, major airlines and airports, industry associations, regulatory bodies and more. That roadmap is targeting entry into service by commercial airliners for up to 100 passengers by 2040 and 20,000 hybrid, electric and H₂-powered aircraft by 2050.

He notes Fabrum has already started looking at certification, “because there's no point going down a technology path that can't be certified. We have a team that's already certified Jet A1 systems for Airbus, and we're taking that knowledge and that approach into the commercialization of our LH₂ fuel systems today.”

Tanks for space, thermoplastics, licensing for high volume production

The other industry that has a long history in using LH₂ tanks is space launch vehicles and they often do use carbon fiber. “The thermal cycling is nowhere near the same,” says Reynolds. “We’ve done work around these applications and even with reusable rockets, you might see 100 or 200 cycles. But that’s at the other end of the spectrum from an aircraft operating every day for years. The mission profile and specification for the equipment is just totally different.”

What about using the toughness of thermoplastic composites to fight microcracking when using carbon fiber at cryogenic temperatures? “I see a lot of challenges with using thermoplastic polymers, and while I think those are solvable, the question is whether they are able to be certified for commercial passenger aircraft. What you can do in a lab is very different than what is required to certify an aircraft fuel system for flight and put it into commercial service. So, at the moment, we’re using thermoset composite technology — not because it can't be done another way, but because the technical challenges involved and compliance pathway for those alternatives are substantial. We don’t believe carbon fiber is the right material for the primary LH₂ containment.”

According to the AZEA roadmap, the demand for lightweight, affordable composite LH₂ tanks could increase significantly over the next 10-15 years. Will Fabrum need to change its approach to deal with higher production volumes? “We recognize that we're not going to supply and ship from New Zealand at a large scale,” says Reynolds. “In our work with Tier 1 companies, we've discussed licensing to set up contract manufacturers where needed. Our systems are not dependent on expensive or exotic materials but instead use clever design and processes that are also practical and affordable. There are some things we do that I don't believe anyone else in the world does, but we can transfer that technology to licensed partners, who also won’t need to be aligned with a major carbon fiber supplier.”

Fabrum composites beyond LH₂

Fabrum does a lot work that uses composites but is unrelated to LH₂. “We're not a company that produces a set group of products,” says Reynolds, “but mainly have technologies that we apply to a wide range of areas.” He notes a customer in Europe that builds magnetic gearboxes for deep sea submersibles and other applications. Featuring embedded ferrites, the gearboxes hermetically seal the drive system and are impervious and leak tight at kilometers of ocean depth.

Fabrum has developed a wide range of superconducting technology using composites that handles thermal shock cycling, impulse pressure and vacuum with low heat loss and thin-walled construction. Demonstrated in generators, motors and transformers, its composite architecture is well-suited for aviation, space and industrial applications. Source | Fabrum

“We also build leak tight helium systems for companies working with electric motors, including production of motors for MagniX (Everett, Wash., U.S.).” Fabrum also works with superconducting systems, where their non-magnetic composite containment is used for devices that use a powerful magnetic field to confine plasma for nuclear fusion. “They all need high field magnetics and use a lot of composites for their support structures,” says Reynolds.

“We've also built superconducting transformers,” he continues. “We’ll supply those for a superconducting train project we’re working on as well as levitation cryostats. I'd say we're the only commercial company worldwide still in operation that builds superconducting equipment out of composites.”

Notably, Airbus has included superconductive systems as part of its technology roadmap for its ZEROe H2-powered aircraft. “Superconductivity is the next revolution,” says Reynolds, “ which will gain adoption once superconducting tape can be made affordably. When that happens, there will be a need for all these composite systems we make.”

These do use a bit of carbon fiber to dissipate static charge, but they mostly comprise glass fiber, says Reynolds. Here also, thermosets are preferred, he says, “because thermoplastics have a much higher coefficient of expansion, so, they're not as dimensionally stable, which is critical for the precision required in these applications.” The company will use a range of materials, including aramid fibers, titanium and other metals, and has developed broad in-house manufacturing and machining capabilities.

Derisking LH₂ tanks for the industry

If Fabrum has demonstrated composite LH₂ tanks that can be filled, emptied, refilled as well as sit idle and perform in flight, why are so many groups in Europe still developing their own LH₂ composite tanks? “Those projects support local industries,” says Reynolds. “We understand that and now have a team in Europe. It’s a challenge, for sure. But I think we also offer the ability to help derisk these systems. We’ve got an end-to-end solution in place and that's valuable because, especially in LH₂, if you don't do the right thing at each stage, you hamstring the following stage.”

He gives the mining trucks as an example, where Fabrum went from no one doing this to a system using up to 600 kilograms of LH₂ to power a 1.2-megawatt fuel cell with complex requirements on how it was dispensed. “We went with metallic tanks at that time, but as I said, we’re now ready to replace those with composites.”

Regarding how Airbus and the aviation industry is going to meet 9G crash load requirements, Reynolds readily acknowledges that carbon fiber will be needed. “Our approach has been to focus on the essential part that had to be proved, which is handling the LH₂ fuel,” he adds. “There is knowledge in the industry that can solve the other issues with structural integration, etc. But getting the LH₂ fuel handling to work as needed, reliably and with an affordable, lightweight system — that was key. And we’ve now proven that with a composite tank for small aircraft but we also know how to transfer half a ton of LH₂ in the shortest time possible with the least losses. We’ll continue to scale these systems for efficient refueling and zero emissions propulsion and also continue to advance certification.”

Source | FASTER-H2 video, DLR Institute of Structures and Design

FASTER-H2 (Fuselage, Rear Fuselage and Empennage with Cabin and Cargo Architecture Solution validation and Technologies for H2 integration) is a Clean Aviation project led by Airbus (Toulouse, France) with multiple European partners including the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR) and the French Aerospace Lab ONERA.

Running from 2023-2026, the project aimed to demonstrate a crashworthy integrated fuselage and empennage configuration for H₂ aircraft to technology readiness level (TRL) 4.

NLR completed research on the following key technologies:

• Using acoustic emission to detect microcracking in composite liquid H₂ tanks at extremely low temperatures (20 Kelvin/253°C).
• Developing double-hinged rudder (DHR) designs to improve fuel efficiency while maintaining aeroelastic stability.
• Applying induction welding to thick thermoplastic composites (TPC).
• Advancing faster nondestructive inspection (NDI) methods for these materials.

Results demonstrated the effectiveness of fiber optic AE sensors in detecting microcrack formation even at cryogenic temperatures.

The DHR concept was found to maintain aeroelastic stability through an external mechanism and spanwise splits, enhancing its effectiveness. Furthermore, 7.4-millimeter-thick TPC intercostals were successfully joined to a skin using induction welding, achieving high strength at the coupon level and validating model predictions.

Lastly, infrared thermography proved effective in detecting defects in large-scale, carbon fiber-reinforced TPC fuselage skins up to 4.5 millimeters deep, achieving TRL 4.

Read more on NLR’s FASTER-H2 web page and in CW news and articles about composites for LH₂.

Source | Cygnet Texkimp

Cygnet Texkimp (Northwich, U.K.) has secured two contracts to supply its high-volume 3D weaving creel technology into the aerospace market.

The large-scale creels will be used to unwind carbon fibers into 3D weaving looms producing lightweight, high-performance engine components for next-generation aircraft. Each creel will be built to incorporate between 5,000 and 7,000 bobbins of carbon fiber.

The contracts are the latest to result from a decade-long program of collaborative work between Cygnet Texkimp, aerospace manufacturers and independent research organizations to develop and test specialist creel technologies that support innovation in 3D weaving.

3D weaving offers manufacturers a way of creating strong, lightweight and structural carbon fiber-reinforced composite parts by weaving thousands of individual fiber tows into complex 3D forms. Manufacturers of new-generation aircraft components are using 3D weaving to build parts with considerable structural integrity by applying very high volumes of fibers in accurate formation. The process is being adopted as part of strategies to improve sustainability and achieve decarbonization by developing lighter and more efficient components including aircraft engines, fan cases and blades, wings, tubes and connectors.

Cygnet Texkimp’s 3D Weaving Creels unwind and feed fibers into a 3D loom in a way that is consistent, accurate and repeatable. The creel is designed to accommodate thousands of fiber bobbins and ensure the integrity of every fiber tow as they travel in close proximity through the process, using a bespoke guide system to accommodate varied fiber counts (k-counts) and tow widths. An intelligent control system is used to maintain low and consistent running tension of the fiber into the downstream weaving process and enables operators to adjust the tension of individual positions or zones according to fiber weight and position in the woven structure.

“Our creel capability has been tested over several decades and this gives our aerospace partners confidence that our equipment performs to the highest tolerances for accuracy and repeatability, ease of operation and fiber handling, all of which are crucial in this demanding industry,” concludes Peter Stevenson, Cygnet Texkimp product director for creels.

Source | © DLR. All rights reserved

In the Urban Rescue project (2020-2024), the German Aerospace Center (DLR) designed, produced and crash-tested a two-seat eVTOL rotorcraft for use in emergency medical and urban rescue operations. It was designed as a flying medical response unit with a hybrid-electric system and a crash-tested carbon fiber-reinforced composite structure.

The emphasis on safety includes features such as energy-absorbing components and a reinforced cabin, proven effective in high-impact crash simulations. Built using low-waste advanced composites manufacturing and developed entirely digitally, this aircraft sets a new standard for safe and efficient emergency air mobility.

The project was led by the DLR Institute of Structures and Design in Stuttgart and included the following departments:

• Component Design and Manufacturing Technologies and Structural Integrity
• Automation and Quality Assurance in Production Technology at the Augsburg site, which is also the Augsburg Center for Lightweight Production Technology (ZLP).

The eVTOL design focused in particular on the composite underbody structure, and was cooperatively developed, designed, manufactured as a demonstrator and crash tested in a continuous interdisciplinary exchange. Project management and production was in Augsburg and the tests and the final crash test took place in Stuttgart.

Crashworthy eVTOL design focused on underbody structure

In parallel to the classic structural design for developing an airframe, a crashworthy design and the consideration of manufacturing and production aspects were also implemented and analyzed in all design phases. The crash design developed includes the airframe structure, safe battery integration and crash-absorbing seats. The aim of linking structural design, crash design and production was to develop an underbody that combines an optimized, crash-safe structural design with innovative production processes.

Manufacturing using multiple composite technologies

A demonstrator structure of the medical personnel deployment eVTOL, comprising the central underbody structure and the two main frames, was manufactured at the ZLP in Augsburg in accordance with the results of the design process. Various fiber-reinforced composite technologies were used to produce the demonstrator structure including dry fiber placement, resin transfer molding (RTM) and the out-of-autoclave (OOA) prepreg. The processes were selected depending on the respective structural requirements and served to realize reliable, lightweight component production.

Full-scale crash test validates composite underbody safety

The demonstrator with crash-optimized seats and crash-proof battery integration was installed in a test rig structure at the institute in Stuttgart. The crash concept was successfully proven in a full-scale crash test under realistic, combined horizontal-vertical impact conditions (v_z = 7.4 m/s, v_x = 4.3 m/s). The findings of the Urban Rescue project will be incorporated into future research projects on the design of eVTOL and helicopter structures.

Source | General Atomics AeroTec Systems

On May 2, the Do228 NXT composite demonstrator aircraft developed by General Atomics AeroTec Systems GmbH (GA-ATS, Gauting, Germany) achieved its first successful flight, a milestone nearly 45 years after the original Do228 first entered service, and a new chapter for the multi-role turboprop program.

Following its maiden flight, the Do228 NXT demonstrator is scheduled for additional production test flights in the coming weeks. These flights will gather important data across a range of conditions, including different altitudes, speeds, flight patterns, take-offs, and landings before the aircraft’s official unveiling to the global public in summer 2026.

Craig Simpson, managing director of GA-ATS, underlines the program’s progress and significance: “The first flight of the NXT demonstrator is the culmination of years of dedicated work across all departments. It is a true reflection of the expertise and commitment of our entire team in Oberpfaffenhofen. The Do228 NXT is not just an upgrade — it is our answer to the demands of modern aviation.”

Over the next few weeks, additional production test flights will be conducted with the Do228 NXT demonstrator aircraft to gather important data and evaluate its flight characteristics including testing at different altitudes, speeds, flight patterns, takeoffs and landings, as well as various operational scenarios.

In parallel with flight testing, GA-ATS is advancing production preparations. A contract with aerospace company Röder Präzision GmbH (Egelsbach, Germany) announced in February 2026 covers the manufacture of more than 100 composite components that will be installed on the aircraft. These parts are being produced using carbon or glass fiber prepregs processed under precisely defined temperature and pressure conditions to achieve high strength and low weight.

“It is important to us that the majority of the manufacturing steps for the Do228 NXT take place in Germany and Europe so that we can guarantee quality and a stable supply chain,” notes Florian Roe, managing director of GA-ATS. “We are therefore pleased about the continued cooperation, which will contribute significantly to the successful market launch of our Do228 NXT this year [2026].”

The Do228 NXT is a twin-engine turboprop aircraft with short takeoff and landing (STOL) capability. It was developed for passenger and cargo transport as well as for special missions and offers a wide range of equipment options.

Source | ENGEL

In collaboration with multiple partners, ENGEL (Schwertberg, Austria) has developed a scalable lightweight design for drone propeller blades combining unidirectional (UD) carbon fiber tapes with injection molding for a fully automated, high-volume process.

• Load-oriented design: Fiber tapes placed along stress paths enable maximum stiffness at minimal weight

• Integrated production: Tape placement and overmolding in one cycle deliver series-ready speeds

• Functional integration: Structural, acoustic, and mounting features combined in a single part

• Thermoplastic composites advantage: Lightweight, recyclable and suitable for mass production

Why it matters for mobility

This technology accelerates the shift from metal and thermoset composites to fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composites, enabling lighter EV structures, fewer parts and more cost-efficient high-volume composite parts production.

As composite performance meets injection-molding productivity, applications will expand rapidly across EVs, aerospace, and micro-mobility. ENGEL is helping turn advanced composites into industrial reality, opening new possibilities for scalable lightweight mobility design.

Source | ENGEL LinkedIn post

Read more about propeller blades in CW news and articles. 

Source: Additive Manufacturing Media

This week’s Pic is a 3D component for the Thermal Protection Systems (TPS) used on spacecraft.

Produced as part of an STTR contract with NASA/Johnson Space Center, this part demonstrates the possibility of 3D printing TPS materials directly onto spacecraft components, conforming to their geometry.

Current methods of shielding these vehicles from heat are expensive and labor intensive; 3D printing shielding material directly onto parts promises to reduce complexity and improve durability. 

In this case, the shielding material has been deposited onto an aluminum dome simulating a spacecraft part. The material used is a thermoset foam which adopts ceramic-like properties once cured. It was developed by Dr. Brett Compton and Dr. Damiano Bacerella at the University of Tennessee – Knoxville.

The five-axis 3D printing necessary to produce this structure onto a nonplanar aluminum dish was performed by printer OEM re:3D, with support from Siemens’ CATCH Center for the motion control and Addiguru for deposition monitoring.

• Material: Phenolic-based foam
• Machine: Re:3D large-format five-axis extrusion system
• Postprocessing: Cured in a high-temperature oven

But it wasn’t all fun and games, even as a child. “They had little plastic part containers that needed labels,” she remembers. Subia eventually got a B.S. in animal science/pre-vet from Cal Poly Pomona and eventually found a career working with startup pet food companies. In addition to exposing her to a different form of manufacturing, she worked with hundreds of mom-and-pop shops across the US that reminded her of her parents’ business. But three years ago, that changed.

Stepping In

Subia’s father founded Bedard Machine in 1979. “When you were working for someone else and you scrapped an aerospace part, they terminated you on the spot back then,” she says. “So, with him having a kid on the way, he wanted to insulate a space where he could fail and learn.”

He and a business partner took a loan from his father-in-law and set up shop with one machine in a 300-square-foot space. Subia says the shop’s early years were difficult: Her father’s business partner left after six months, leaving her father to take on more work and longer hours to keep the business afloat. According to Subia, vendors who worked with Bedard in the early years were instrumental keeping the shop going. “Steve Fry from Fry Steel let him have material for jobs and pay for it after the job shipped,” she says. “My dad even bargained with Precon, an outside grind house, offering a grinder as collateral to pay for jobs. Precon trusted his work ethic and didn’t take the deal. They told him they knew he would make it, and he could pay them back later.” After a few years, the business had grown enough that Subia’s mother quit her job and jumped in to handle the shop’s finances.

Bedard Machine found a niche in the aerospace industry. “He was known for taking on the super-complex parts that nobody else could figure out,” she says. “That's kind of our niche: super-tight tolerance precision aerospace parts.” And as the aerospace industry grew, so did the shop — to 11,400 square feet, 17 machines and 23 employees.

But nearly 10 years ago, Subia’s father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and Lewy body dementia. Subia’s paternal grandmother had passed from Alzheimer’s, and Subia says this became one of her father’s biggest fears, which in turn affected how he ran the business. As Bedard Machine grew, he fostered an environment that was open to training and education. “He had a teacher’s mindset. He was the type that wanted to show someone how to do it so that he could let them take over and then he could move on to something else,” she says. “He put himself in the position where he cross-trained people how to do everything he did by the time his disease took over.”

Subia says about three years ago, her father’s condition worsened. Her mother had taken over, and on occasion, Subia would stop by the shop on her way home from her job working for a pet food company. “I started realizing how much weight my mom was carrying and how much was getting swept under the rug because my dad's brain wasn't there, even though he was physically there,” she says.

Subia decided to take a month-long sabbatical from her job to help the business hire a few new team members to support her mom as she ran the shop. “Well, when I jumped in, I fell in love with the industry,” she says.

Not only was Subia ready to take control of the business, but her father was also finally willing to relinquish that control. “I know he would have never stopped working,” she says. “He loved it.” But he knew it was time to pass leadership of the shop over to the next generation and welcomed her into the business with open arms. “My dad didn't give out compliments, but I felt like he was proud of me when he was still there and I was making decisions and taking over,” she remembers.

Worlds Collide

Subia was surprised to find so much crossover between manufacturing pet food and aerospace components. “I didn't realize my worlds were colliding until I stepped into the shop,” she says. She saw parallels between the strict traceability requirements in both industries. “In pet food manufacturing, say you have a recall on parsley,” she explains. “You have to be able to trace where that parsley came from and what lots that parsley went into. Traceability starts at the beginning of the run.” By AS9100 standards, aerospace components need to be handled similarly. “You order a material, you have a cert with a material, that material cert has to stick with that job and anything that gets touched on that part has to be fully traced to that lot.” This helped ease her into her new role. “That all made sense to me,” she says. “I was not expecting to come into the industry and link that.”

At the same time, entering a new industry had its challenges. Subia was jumping into an existing business that was running “at 500 miles an hour” with as many as 230 jobs open at any given time. In this environment, she was learning the industry and making decisions to improve operations, and she couldn’t rely on her go-to source: her father. Due to his condition, “I didn't have my dad's brain to ask” for advice, she says.

Instead, she found other resources to help bring her up to speed on aerospace manufacturing. “I had former employees come back on Saturdays and teach me how to close out travelers for example, among other things,” she says. She also connected with other local shops and the shop’s customers. “We work a lot with Parker Hannifin,” she explains. “They embraced me, I think because of the relationship that my dad had built with them. Their people would come into our shop, and they would break down processes for me.” She was surprised by how quickly customers embraced her. “I thought they were going to see a woman come into a shop with no prior experience and assume, ‘She doesn't know what she's doing,’” she continues. “Instead, they were eager to help, saying ‘We want to help you. How can we help you? You can call us at any time. We'll show you because we want you to be successful.’”

As Subia learned the business, she started taking on tasks in the shop. “I threw myself into the weeds of the company because I wanted to learn,” she says. “I put myself in charge of all the corrective actions, submitting them back to the customer and figuring out the root cause because I basically reverse engineered how to make good parts that way. I also gave myself the AS9100 yearly audit and hired consultants to teach me so I could quickly learn the standards of operations.”

Next, Subia took on metrics, working to improve the shop’s on-time delivery rate from 60 to 90%. “I saw the gaps in the processes,” she says. “It was taking us 10 to 12 weeks to even get material in house so we could start a job. How do we clean up that process and shave it down to three weeks so that we can get jobs open quicker and on the floor quicker?”

Confidence to Change

As Subia grew more confident, she made more improvements within the business. She shuffled some employees around and made new hires, with an emphasis on making employees’ workloads more manageable and shoring up the quality department. “We were growing at a fast rate with Parker, so we had to figure out PPAP [production part approval process]. A PPAP can take 40 hours,” she explains. “So, I hired a specific QC auditor that was just in charge of quality docs.” She had another employee go back to school for an inspection certification and moved him to the quality department full time. Subia also encouraged cross-training. “We had a beautiful five-axis mill that only one person in our shop knew how to run, which was our shop foreman,” she recalls. “I said, ‘We can't have you tied to this. Teach someone else how to run that machine.’”

Subia added new equipment in addition to the employees. The quality department got a new Hexagon CMM, updated some quality equipment including Borescopes, added Deburr King tanks, and generally focused on speeding up processes with that equipment. She also added a Yama Seiki GLS-3300 YS multiaxis lathe to the shop floor, along with pyramid workholding fixtures for the five-axis machine. The shop also has two additional new machines on order, including a multispindle lathe.

The shop is seeing the effects of these changes. The new pyramid workholding fixtures in the five-axis machine enable it to machine multiple parts at once. Time analysis has reduced cycle times by 50% on an output shaft the shop makes. Lead times have dropped from 12 weeks of office time to three. And in the past three years, the shop’s business has doubled.

Succession Planning for Success

Despite knowing the disease would force her father’s departure from the business, Subia says her father had not created a formal succession plan when she joined Bedard Machine. When her father was no longer mentally capable, her mother was running the shop, but Subia says her mother was becoming overwhelmed with the responsibilities of both the business and her husband’s illness and would have likely closed the shop had Subia not stepped in. Once she came onboard, the shop found a consultant through the NTMA to help create a succession plan. A grant covered about 40% of these costs.

Her father maintains a connection with the shop not only through his daughter, but also through regular visits from longtime employees. “Gilbert and Alicia take him lunch every Thursday,” Subia says. “That's the only day that he gets excited and asks, ‘Are they coming to see me?’ And they'll bring him parts. He gets excited and intently looks at the parts. They have been employees of his for almost 30 years and are like family to us.”

Subia is determined to continue her father’s legacy, but she says it’s a fine line to walk. “I feel like the people that have been there working there provided my childhood,” she says. “So, I feel like I owe it to them to keep it going.” And she takes the responsibility of running a business seriously. “I really believe in the American dream and providing people an income and a job they can be proud of. And I don't take that lightly and I don't think my dad did. So that's a legacy that gets to live through me.”

At the same time, she knew she couldn’t barge in and change everything all at once, especially given that her mother continues to handle the finances while managing her husband’s care and working through the emotions of his diagnosis. “I'm a long-term thinker, so I like to have it all figured out in real time to prepare for the future. And when I came in with that mindset, it caused a lot of problems with my mom because she wasn't necessarily ready for that,” she explains. “I had to honor and respect that the business is like their child too.”

After making such a significant career change, Subia is happy with where she (and the shop) are. “It may not be what I thought I would be doing, but I feel like pausing my personal agenda and allowing space to work alongside my mom has brought a new sense of purpose and pride,” she says. “Our story doesn’t end here, but right now we are able to manage the family business and endure a grueling diagnosis together.”

Source (All Images) | GA-EMS

In February 2026, General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems (GA-EMS, San Diego, Calif., U.S.) announced an MOU with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.) to advance industrial manufacturing of advanced ceramic matrix composites (CMC). Under the agreement, GA-EMS will examine its advanced manufacturing processes for ceramic precursors, fibers and composites using resources from the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s (DOE) Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) at ORNL.

GA-EMS president, Scott Forney, explained the goal is to accelerate innovation, strengthen critical U.S. supply chains and deliver advanced materials essential for national security and energy security. “The initiative complements our growing advanced materials and technology capabilities and launch of our Materials Acceleration, Innovation and Transition Exchange [MAITrX] lab.” Featuring capabilities built on more than 70 years of nuclear expertise, MAITrX was established to drive commercial implementation of customized advanced materials, with CMC front and center.

Advanced materials development hub for General Atomics

General Atomics comprises four main business segments and several affiliate companies. The most well-known affiliate is perhaps General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. (GA-ASI), which produces unmanned aerial systems (UAS) including the MQ-9A Reaper, MQ-9B SkyGuardian/SeaGuardian, MQ-1C Gray Eagle and the MQ-20 Avenger and Gambit series.

Source | General Atomics

GA-EMS develops and manufactures advanced electromagnetic systems, including the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) for the U.S. Navy, rail gun technologies and high-power energy lasers, satellite and space sensing systems, hypervelocity projectiles and specialized pulsed-power and energy conversion systems that also support next-generation fission energy applications. “We tend to invest in nuclear technologies,” says Dr. Christina A. Back, vice president of nuclear technologies and materials for GA-EMS, “but also in materials that support all of General Atomics and its affiliates, including areas like hypersonics. Composites are a common investment for the company, and we develop those technologies and specialize them for specific end-use products.”

Range of CMC materials development

CW has reported previously on GA-EMS’ development of SiGA high-temperature cladding comprising silicon carbide (SiC) composites for nuclear fuel rods. In this material, both the fiber and matrix comprise crystalline beta-phase SiC (β-SiC), explains Back, because it resists embrittlement from neutrons in the nuclear reactor. This environment currently requires replacing Zircaloy metal fuel rods in less than 5 years. “In the advanced gas-cooled reactors we’re working with, the SiC/SiC clad fuel rods, which have exceptional resistance to neutron damage, could have a 30-year lifetime in helium coolants,” says Back.

“You could also use carbon fiber in an SiC matrix,” she continues, “and we’re also working on a zirconium carbide fiber (ZrC, melting point ~3540°C) with a different matrix that can go to even higher temperatures.” Carbon/carbon (carbon fiber-reinforced carbon matrix, C/C) is also used heavily in high-temperature applications, “but its drawback is that it erodes in the presence of oxygen at those high temperatures, which influences system design and makes C/C inadequate for some applications.”

“SiC is a stronger matrix, depending on the application,” notes Back, “while C/SiC tries to take advantage of using carbon fiber, which is less expensive and more readily available than SiC fiber.” She notes that these non-oxide CMC typically require an interphase or coating between the fiber and the matrix that allows the fibers to slip, “which gives the pseudo ductile mechanical response required for durability.” This interphase is typically a 0.1- to 1.0-micron-thick layer and may include boron nitride (BN) or pyrolytic carbon (PyC), SiC and multilayer combinations, deposited on SiC fibers before matrix infiltration.

“Many of the processes for these different CMC are similar,” says Back, “but you have different precursors or infiltration materials. We’re pursuing a wide range of technologies, trying to provide a kind of incubator for solutions. We choose materials with an end use in mind and then develop the technology to commercialize them.”

MAITrX as a collaboration center to accelerate CMC

Acceleration, Innovation and Exchange are key pillars of MAITrX. “We want to bring together the ideas, people and organizations of importance to help accelerate commercialization of key materials like CMC,” says Back. “We don’t want to recreate the wheel but instead enable collaboration.”

GA-EMS is developing SiGA-FN fiber to provide a U.S. source of nuclear-grade SiC fiber and uses braiding to create its SiGA cladding for nuclear fuel rods. Source | GA-EMS

The MAITrX lab has 65,000 square feet of space in the GA-EMS Torrey Pines facility, north of La Jolla in the San Diego area. “We span the whole process for CMC including a fiber lab and composites lab,” says Back. “Because we’re making SiC/SiC parts, we’re onshoring SiC fiber [see sidebar below]. The SiC fiber produced by GE Aviation is well-suited for its turbine engine parts, but for nuclear applications, we need the crystalline β-SiC, which isn’t currently produced in adequate quantities in the U.S.”

“We also have braiders, winders and extruders as well as high-temperature furnaces and other processing equipment. The manufacturing approach we use depends on what we’re making.” For example, the SiGA cladding for nuclear fuel rods uses braided SiC/SiC tape to create sleeves which are then infiltrated multiple times with high-purity β-SiC. “We’re doing that in two ways and have proved out the component properties, strengths and material quality that we need,” explains Back. “Our focus now is to improve the manufacturing. The current infiltration processes are too time-consuming, and we know there are ways to improve.”

“ORNL is helping us to answer that scale-up part,” she continues. “The whole point of our MAITrX lab is to really bring together different technological pieces and skill sets. So, we have no problem working with different companies.” 

Why ORNL?

They are a partner that GA-EMS has worked with for a long time, says Back. “They’ve prioritized advanced ceramics and CMC more than other national laboratories and have equipment that we’re not going to invest in until we fully prove out a process.”

“The MAITrX lab tends to focus and be driven by specific end-use applications,” she explains. “We'll look at what the needs are for a hypersonic vehicle or nuclear thermal rocket, for example. But we don’t have the time for exploration the way that a national lab can — they are not making an end product like we are. Although we have a substantial lab facility and manufacturing center, ORNL has done more exploration into scaling up some of the processes. For example, how you wind and unwind ceramic prepreg tape matters, and what temperatures you use in processing. All of those details are important in moving to industrial scale and this is where we are pairing with ORNL.”

Advancing SiC/SiC for next-gen nuclear power

Several examples of GA-EMS advancements in both nuclear fission and fusion applications are detailed in a March 2026 Journal of Nuclear Engineering article that includes Dr. Back and the head of the MAITrX lab, Dr. Hesham Khalifa, among many co-authors. This article explains that for irradiation stability, nuclear-grade SiC/SiC requires using PyC for the interphase because BN is considered a neutron poison while chemical vapor infiltration (CVI) or deposition (CVD) is favored to produce the β-SiC matrix required. Other matrix infiltration methods reportedly have issues — polymer infiltration pyrolysis (PIP) with lower crystallinity and reactive melt infiltration (RMI) with unreacted free silicon — that tend to produce a SiC matrix not as well suited for irradiation environments.

CVI uses a high-temperature vacuum furnace to decompose a precursor gas and deposit β-SiC between the filaments of a SiC fiber preform. This is then repeated to densify the CMC. However, for the meter-long scales required for nuclear fuel cladding and fusion reactor components, controlling the densification uniformity is challenging, and production quantities of nuclear-grade SiC/SiC using CVI have yet to be demonstrated.

GA-EMS SiC/SiC composite parts: (a) Prototype SiC/SiC flow channel insert (FCI); (b) fully densified, 12-foot-long SiGA fuel cladding alongside GA-EMS pilot scale CVI/CVD furnace; (c) cladding showing surface smoothness. Source | GA-EMS, March 2026 article

The March article explains that the MAITrX lab is capable of fabricating full-length, 12-foot-long, high aspect ratio SiC/SiC parts in hundreds of parts per batch. These comprise the SiGA cladding for fuel rods to retrofit nuclear fission reactors, including current light water reactors and high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors. MAITrX has also prototyped flow channel inserts (FCI) for fusion reactors, discussed further below.

MAITrX has installed a 35-foot-tall CVI/CVD processing furnace, designed to produce up to 300 SiGA fuel rods per batch. It’s being used to prove out the path for production scale-up. The facility also has machining capability for final finishing and control of surface roughness.

“We’ve made a huge amount of progress,” says Back, “and we’re now starting to test samples with utilities. Our goal is to demonstrate the properties of the rods and show their performance, but also to look at implementation.” She notes that to retrofit a nuclear reactor, one-third of the full 50,000 fuel rods are replaced at a time. “We’ve scaled from single digits to hundreds of rods and now we’re scaling to tens of thousands.”

“But we’re also looking at some of our formulations,” she notes. “We’re looking at going from something like SiC/SiC using CVI of a preform to a more manufacturing-friendly process for hypersonics. And we see the real importance of shifting from C/C composites to processes that are more efficient, starting from the formulation all the way through production and postprocessing. So, the goal is not only to move parts to more robust and higher temperature-resistant materials for each application, but also to reduce the production time and scale part volumes.”

This fabrication capability is also being used to develop fusion reactor applications, where SiC/SiC is critical to enhance efficiency, decrease maintenance and increase plant longevity. In dual-cooled lead lithium blanket (DCLL) designs, SiC/SiC enables components that withstand high temperatures, radiation and plasma interactions while enabling efficient tritium breeding. For example, the General Atomics Modular Blanket (GAMBL) design uses SiC/SiC structural supports that can use radiative cooling and don’t require a hermetic seal, which enables a range of cost and efficiency advantages.

Scaling production of SiC foam

SiC foam sandwich structures have been researched for FCI and other applications for more than a decade. This example, produced by Ultramet, features integrally bonded SiC skins and core. Source | Ultramet

In addition to monolithic SiC/SiC, low thermal conductivity is offered by SiC foam for applications like FCI, used to guide the flow of liquid metal coolants. However, as explained in the March 2026 article, the hardness of SiC foam makes it difficult and expensive to machine into target geometries, while large sizes of SiC foam are also expensive. Meanwhile, commercially available SiC foam offers limited porosity options, which may not meet the thermal conductivity required for fusion applications. Thus, GA-EMS has developed a scalable, low-cost SiC foam-based fabrication technology for FCI. The process does not begin with SiC but instead with carbon foam — which is easier and cheaper to machine. This is then converted into SiC foam by reacting silicon monoxide (SiO) gas with the carbon to form SiC.

GA-EMS has developed a patent-pending method to generate the SiO gas where a particle containing both Si and SiO₂ is fabricated and then infiltrated into the carbon foam. The reaction to release SiO gas begins at temperatures as low as 1200°C, is highly uniform and results in a highly crystalline β-SiC foam that is expected to be irradiation stable. The converted SiC foam also retains the same volume and geometry as the original carbon foam with <0.5% shrinkage.

GA-EMS has successfully manufactured 6 × 6 × 0.25-inch SiC foam plates and 3 × 3 × 3-inch SiC foam channels. It notes there isn’t a fundamental size limit to the conversion step as long as the Si/SiO₂ particles can be infiltrated into the carbon foam. While large blocks of carbon foam are commercially available, finding the desired pore size and porosity can be a challenge. The March article cites work that appears to provide a means for producing carbon foam to meet nuclear requirements and GA-EMS is continuing to develop and scale this SiC foam technology.

Path to manufacturing, need to revolutionize production

Back returns to the progress GA-EMS has made in SiC/SiC cladding for fuel rods and the path forward to parts production. “We’ve moved from formulating the materials and proving them out in test coupons to evaluating the tube components in a nuclear reactor — and each of those steps required different people.” She notes GA-EMS embeds experts from its manufacturing divisions into these teams. “Once we’ve demonstrated proof of concept, we can look at the costs and the equipment and the way to lay out a plant. We then progress toward a pilot plant and finally full-scale production in one of our manufacturing facilities, which are located near our end-use customers.”

GA-EMS has developed SiC preforms using automated fiber placement of SiGA prepreg tape in collaboration with the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR). Source | General Atomics

“For CMC, we need to really look at revolutionizing how to produce them,” she continues, “and co-location is key, bringing the right people together at the right time in the life cycle — including innovators who are developing formulations that can be standardized with the reproducible properties you need, for example, how to make prepreg tape — to the teams engineering production and implementation. And we work similarly with other companies. That’s the spirit of MAITrX.”

“We’re also developing physics-based modeling and simulation to help reduce the empirical work required and more efficiently guide development but also qualification. Ideally, we will get there faster and integrate the technology in a way that’s already manufacturing friendly so that we can move more quickly to meet the needs.”

“The point is to transition from proof of principle to production at the speed of change today,” says Back. “AI and machine learning are enabling new development cycles. And we need to bring those capabilities together and work together where it makes sense, so that we don’t have these siloed technologies that are nice but not actually advancing our nuclear or hypersonic capabilities, for example. The developments required are difficult, but this is what MAITrX is trying to do — bring together the necessary partners and skills to really move industrialization of CMC and other advanced materials forward in an efficient way.”

Source | Fraunhofer IWS, Leibniz-Institut für Verbundwerkstoffe (IVW)

Fraunhofer IGCV, Fraunhofer IFAM and Fraunhofer IWS are contributing to the 3-year (2023-2026) HESTIA project: Ultra-high-efficiency, Sustainable Fuselage Shells Made of Thermoplastic Fiber-reinforced Composite for a Future Zero-emission Aircraft. This collaborative research initiative funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) focuses on developing lightweight, resource-efficient fuselage shell technologies for next-generation, climate-neutral aircraft.

As one of six interconnected partner projects, HESTIA is targeting the development of thermoplastic composite (TPC) fuselage structures designed to offset the additional mass associated with emerging zero-emission propulsion systems. By reducing structural weight while improving manufacturing efficiency, the project aims to support more sustainable aircraft production and operation.

The technologies being developed through HESTIA are intended to support scalable manufacturing. Project partners note that the laser-enabled manufacturing approaches under development could also be adapted for composite semi-finished goods and components in other industrial sectors beyond aerospace.

Within the project, Fraunhofer IWS lists additional partners include:

• Airbus Operations GmbH (consortium lead)
• Airbus Aerostructures
• CirComp GmbH
• Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e. V.
• Leibniz-Institut für Verbundwerkstoffe GmbH.

Fraunhofer IWS specifically is advancing three primary research areas centered on automated processing and multifunctional composite integration, while Fraunhofer IGCV and Fraunhofer IFAM are dedicated to other themes that partially contribute to the overarching HESTIA project. For instance, the IFAM is responsible for the development of vitrimers, while the IGCV collaborates on comparative studies regarding the influence of laser wavelengths. These efforts also contribute to developing innovative solutions for a climate-neutral aircraft, emphasizing aspects like manufacturing technologies and material efficiency.

CONTIjoin, AFP and vitrimers

One project focus is the further development of the CONTIjoin process for joining thermoplastic multidirectional laminate semi-finished products. Showcased in the right-hand join of the upper and lower fuselage shells in the Clean Aviation MFFD project, the process is now being adapted for additional material systems, including various unidirectional (UD) tape as well as vitrimers, which are polymers that cross-link like thermosets but can be reheated, reformed and recycled like thermoplastics.

FTIR spectrum of high-performance thermoplastic polymer with and without carbon fiber reinforcement shows low absorption of matrix polymer at diode laser wavelength and high absorption at CO₂ laser wavelength. Source | Fraunhofer IWS

Unlike conventional layup systems that use solid-state or diode lasers absorbed primarily by carbon fibers, the CONTIjoin process uses CO_₂ laser radiation absorbed directly by the polymer matrix. This reportedly enables improved thermal process control during joining operations.

Drapeability and integrated LSP

HESTIA researchers are also investigating alternative perforation methods for fiber-reinforced composite semi-finished products. Perforation is used to locally interrupt carbon fiber reinforcement to improve drapeability during AFP and thermal forming processes. Current mechanical perforation methods can result in significant tool wear, prompting interest in noncontact, laser-based alternatives.

A tape test demonstrates strong adhesion of grid-pattern copper coating to a carbon fiber/thermoplastic substrate. Source | Fraunhofer IWS

A third research area addresses electrical continuity in integrated lightning protection systems (LSP). The project is developing an automated process chain capable of electrically bridging discontinuities in copper mesh layers located at fuselage joints or repaired sections. Following laser surface functionalization of the TPC, a conductive copper layer is applied using thermal spraying and structured into a grid pattern analogous to conventional LSP mesh materials.

IVW window frames using rCF

Another partner is Leibniz-Institut für Verbundwerkstoffe GmbH (IVW, Kaiserslautern), the non-profit Institute for Composite Materials at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern. IVW is targeting material- and energy-efficient production of aircraft window frames using a TPC material made with recycled carbon fiber (rCF) (project funding reference 20W2203E). The characteristic properties of staple fibers are used in a specific way to make optimal use of the mechanical properties of the window frame structure. The implementation of this innovative material offers great potential for reducing CO_₂ emissions in the production of aircraft components, while improving material efficiency and lightweight construction quality.

The starting material for the window frames are staple fiber yarns consisting of polyaryletherketone (PAEK) filaments and rCF with a length >50 millimeters. These are formed into tapes in a specially developed impregnation and stretching unit at IVW. The result is a consolidated rCF tape that contains oriented, discontinuous reinforcing fibers. This morphology enables wave-free placement due to the sliding of the fibers, even in the production of components with complex, curved geometries, such as a window frame while alignment along the curved load paths maximizes structural efficiency.

Topology-optimized fiber orientation modeled for a thermoplastic composite (TPC) aircraft window frame. Source | Leibniz-Institut für Verbundwerkstoffe (IVW)

The load-bearing structure can then be functionalized through overmolding, ensuring optimal transfer of external loads into the structural insert. This not only enables improved load distribution, but also significantly increases the durability and reliability of the entire structure. Finite element modeling (FEM) is being used to optimize fiber paths and force introduction geometries, followed by manufacturing of  prototype window frames and physical testing to validate simulation and design.

IVW lists additional partners, including Airbus Operations GmbH, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V., Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung, Airbus Aerostructures GmbH and Albany International.

Left to right: Roberto Chaves, executive VP of global procurement and supply chain (Embraer); Stacey Reiersgaard, VP of commercial aerospace growth (Hexcel); Lyndon Smith, president, Americas and global fibers (Hexcel); and Luciano Castro, VP of global procurement (Embraer). Source | Hexcel

Embraer (São José dos Campos, Brazil) has awarded composite materials company Hexcel Corp. (Stamford, Conn., U.S.) with the Embraer Best Suppliers Award in the “Standards & Materials” category for the second consecutive year, recognizing the company’s performance across quality, delivery, collaboration and operational excellence.

“This recognition is a testament to the dedication of our global teams and the strength of our longstanding partnership with Embraer,” says Lyndon Smith, president, Americas and global fibers, Hexcel. “We are honored by this continued recognition and remain focused on delivering advanced composite solutions that support Embraer’s aircraft programs.”

The award was presented during Embraer’s annual Suppliers Conference in São José dos Campos, where the company recognized partners that demonstrate exceptional engagement, performance and alignment with Embraer’s operational and strategic priorities.

“A strong and aligned supply chain is essential to Embraer’s ability to execute, compete and grow,” notes Roberto Chaves, executive VP of global procurment and supply chain at Embraer. 

Hexcel has been a trusted supplier to Embraer for decades, providing advanced carbon fiber and composite materials that are integral to the performance, efficiency and reliability of Embraer aircraft across commercial, defense and business aviation platforms.

One of the Graco HFR machines being installed. Source | Infinite Composites

Infinite Composites (Tulsa, Okla., U.S.) has just leveled up production capacity, with funding provided by private investors, with support by the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology (OCAST) and the Oklahoma Department of Commerce’s OIEP program enabling this expansion.  

The investment includes:

• Two McClean Anderson four-axis filament winders (up to 72 inches in diameter/45 feet in length).
• Two Yaskawa Motoman MPX2600 robots (six-plus-axis) on 20- and 45-foot rail systems.
• Three Graco Inc. hydraulic fixed ratio (HFR) metering machines for robotic, high-pressure, heated application of high-viscosity polymer coatings.

All of which will expand what Infinite Composites can build — and how fast it can deliver — across large composite structures, automated processing and protective coating systems. “Infinite Composites is making big moves to support our ever-growing customer base,” says Infinite Composites founder and CEO Matt Villarreal. “These new capabilities will enable the automated production of large composite tanks, rocket motor casings, tubes and other high-performance structures.”

Founded in 2010, the company is known for designing and manufacturing lightweight, linerless Type 5 composite pressure vessels, which are used in aerospace, defense and transportation. Read “Infinite Composites: Type V tanks for space, hydrogen, automotive and more.”

Read more through this LinkedIn post and about Infinite Composites.

The Proteus uncrewed experimental aircraft alongside the Istar research aircraft. Source (All Images) | DLR, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Lightweigh Systems (Braunschweig, Germany) has made progress on its composite “shape-shifting” wing structure concept, highlighted in November 2025. Developed within the morphAIR project, both the conventional reference wing and the HyTEM morphing wing have been successfully tested in initial trial flights on the Proteus unmanned aircraft platform, serving to demonstrate basic airworthiness and system integration for further measurement campaigns and investigations.

Proteus during takeoff.

Although the researchers collected data during scaled flight tests, the aerodynamic and structural design, with a maximum speed of 300 kilometers/hour and a wing loading of 70 kilograms/square meter, is also relevant for light aircraft. To demonstrate scalability, DLR will conduct a flight test campaign in 2026 using Proteus with a total mass of approximately 70 kilograms. Findings will be developed further within the UAdapt (Unmanned Aircraft Wing Adaption) project.

Replacing conventional flaps and ailerons

A wing structure that can change shape during flight — this is the idea behind the morphAIR project in an effort to make aircraft more efficient and easier to control. “The morphing wing can change its shape during flight, allowing it to adapt optimally to different flight conditions,” explains project leader Martin Radestock from the DLR Institute of Lightweight Systems. Flight tests at the National Experimental Test Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems in Cochstedt have already enabled DLR to test the functionality of the wings.

The morphing wing pair features a form-variable trailing edge section, made possible by a hyperelastic trailing edge morphing system (HyTEM), which enables the wing to deform seamlessly and without steps. “The HyTEM concept replaces conventional flaps and ailerons with an intelligent system comprising several small actuators distributed across the wingspan,” says Radestock. “These can precisely adjust the wing profiles at 10 points without creating gaps between sections. The continuous shape reduces profile drag. In addition, lift, induced drag and aircraft control can all be influenced in a targeted manner.”

A DLR video follows the journey from the first functional demonstrator to this inaugural flight shape-changing wings.

A central element of the project is an AI-assisted flight control system developed by the DLR Institute of Flight Systems, designed specifically to make full use of the unique movement capabilities of the morphing wing. During flight, the adaptive algorithm detects when the aircraft’s actual behavior deviates from its previously trained model and continuously adjusts its internal models. During training, specific damage scenarios and failures of individual control surfaces are also deliberately simulated. This allows the algorithm to learn to recognize such changes in flight and control the remaining actuators in a way that keeps flight behavior as stable as possible. Unlike conventional flight control systems, this adaptive approach can optimally coordinate the many distributed actuators, making the most of the aerodynamic potential of the morphing structure while also improving fault tolerance.

A key element in this is the reliable method for reconstructing surface pressure distribution from just a small amount of measurement data. This capability, developed by the DLR Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology for Proteus, gives the system an immediate “sense” of its current flow field. The experimental aircraft can thus compare the reconstructed pressure field with the expected state, automatically detect local deviations and interpret them as relevant disturbances.

Utah, Layton site (top left), Bellingham, Woburn (bottom right) and Mount Vernon (right). Source | Janicki Industries

On April 16, Janicki Industries (Sedro-Woolley, Wash., U.S.) announced a multistate growth plan to address growing customer demand in the aerospace, defense, space and marine industries. The plan includes new and expanded facilities in Washington and Utah totaling more than 270,000 square feet of additional production space and more than 250 new jobs, along with the evaluation of up to 1 million square feet of new manufacturing operations in Idaho or Montana.

In Washington, Janicki continues to invest across multiple sites. The company has purchased a 40,000-square-foot facility in Mount Vernon, designated MV1, which is undergoing renovations to modern standards and will be outfitted with advanced machining equipment. The site will add up to 75 jobs.

Janicki has also continued to expand its 251,000-square-foot Bellingham facility, purchased in 2022, with updated CNC machining equipment, autoclaves and ovens, and expanded clean rooms for composite layup. The Bellingham site anticipates growth with 125 new roles.

The company is completing construction of Building 12, a 162,000-square-foot manufacturing facility at its Hamilton campus. Combined, these investments expand Janicki’s Washington footprint to more than 1 million square feet.

“Washington is our home, and that is not changing. Our footprint [here] has continued to grow but is slowing due to ever-increasing regulations and lack of business understanding at an executive and legislative level,” says John Janicki, president of Janicki. “Decisions at the state level not only make it difficult for our employees to achieve the American Dream, but it is making it difficult for us to create new jobs for future employees by investing in local growth. With this in mind, it is best for Janicki to focus its large-scale expansion into a more business-friendly environment, so we are pursuing out-of-state growth.”

Janicki’s 100,000-square-foot manufacturing site in Layton, Utah, will receive a 70,000-square-foot expansion on the west side of the building. The addition will house milling equipment, two-story office space, warehouse operations and a new shipping dock, increasing the company’s capacity for machining composite and metallic aerospace components. Groundbreaking is expected in early summer 2026, with the expansion adding more than 50 new jobs.

As part of its long-term growth plan, Janicki is also evaluating opportunities to establish new manufacturing operations in either Idaho or Montana, with the potential for up to 2 million square feet of new facilities over time. The company expects to select one of the two states and will evaluate factors including workforce availability, proximity to customers and business-friendly environments.

“Both Idaho and Montana offer the workforce, infrastructure and business-friendly environment that advanced manufacturing requires,” says Lavacca, education and outreach manager at Janicki. “We are completing feasibility studies in both states and will share more details once a final location has been selected.”

Since 2022, Janicki has more than doubled its workforce and continues to rapidly grow in response to customer needs. The company currently employs more than 1,900 people and operates over 1 million square feet of production space across Washington and Utah. The multistate growth plan positions Janicki to meet sustained demand from aerospace and defense customers while strengthening the domestic manufacturing base.

Source | Kilometro Rosso, Petroceramics, CIRA

Kilometro Rosso is a leading Italian innovation district and science-technology park in Bergamo, Italy. Famous for its 1-kilometer-long red wall along the A4 motorway, the large open innovation campus was inaugurated in 2009 and acts as a hub for industrial research and high-tech manufacturing, hosting more than 80 resident partners. Its lead and anchor tenant is the 28,000-square-meter Brembo Technical Center for brake research, production and testing which has also served to advance serial production of ceramic matrix composite (CMC) brakes and components.

Petroceramics (Stezzano, Italy), located adjacent to the Brembo Technical Center, was also one of Kilometro Rosso’s first tenants as a spin-off from the University of Milan. It has now progressed into a leader in CMC technology, championed by Kilometro Rosso as demonstrating how "deep tech" research can translate into a solid competitive advantage within the global space economy.

Applying its years of CMC experience and expertise, Petroceramics has developed components that can enable launcher exhaust nozzles. These high-tech panels resist temperatures up to 3,000°C without deforming or decomposing. Kilometro Rosso reports the strategic pillars of this innovative SME include:

• Intellectual property: A portfolio of more than 30 patents focused on high temperature performance.
• Diversification: Applications from automotive brakes to a variety of parts for major players in the space industry.
• Scale-up: The vital development of industrial processes, supported by know-how and partners such as Brembo.

Kilometro Rosso reports this type of success demonstrates how this ecosystem is an enabler for transforming materials and process innovations into industrial realities capable of competing on a global scale.

Source | Getty Images

IGCS International (Dallas, Texas, U.S.) a CVE-certified, service-disabled veteran-owned small business (SDVOSB) and provider of mission support and MRO supplies to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and federal agencies, has announced that Lacks Enterprises (Grand Rapids, Mich., U.S.) has acquired an equity stake in the company.

Founded in 1961, Lacks Enterprises is a family-owned advanced manufacturer with more than six decades of expertise in polymer chemistry, chrome plating on plastics, injection molding, metal finishing and high-performance composites. The company’s Lacks Carbon Fiber division produces ultra-lightweight, two-piece carbon fiber wheels and components — capabilities now positioned to benefit aerospace and government applications.

The strategic investment combines IGCS International’s expertise in government supply chain alignment, logistics and MRO solutions — including multiple multi-million dollar BPAs, IDIQs and other contract vehicles with the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army commands — with Lacks Enterprises’ advanced manufacturing capabilities. Together, the companies will introduce high-performance automotive technologies, including electroplating, injection molding, composites and innovative lightweight materials to aerospace, defense and broader government sectors.

The partnership will focus on expanding the availability of lightweight composite technologies, advanced materials and integrated supply chain solutions to enhance mission readiness, reduce weight, improve performance and better support the DoD and other federal agencies.

Sources | Hefei Sinopower, AECC, website for AEP100

As reported by Hefei Sinopower (Hefei, Anhui Province, China), a manufacturer of Type 4 hydrogen (H₂) pressure vessels under the brand name Rubri, China announced that the megawatt-class H₂-fueled turboprop engine AEP100, developed by Aero Engine Corp. of China (AECC, Beijing), has successfully completed its maiden flight, mounted on a 7.5-ton unmanned cargo aircraft in Zhuzhou, Hunan Province. According to official media, this marks “the world's first flight test of a megawatt-class H₂-fueled turboprop engine.”

The test flight lasted 16 minutes, covering a distance of 36 kilometers at a speed of 220 kilometers/hour and an altitude of 300 meters. The aircraft completed its planned maneuvers and returned safely to the airport. AECC reported that the engine operated smoothly and stably throughout the flight.

The news report noted this test flight was a short-duration, low-altitude unmanned validation, not a commercial breakthrough, yet it signifies that H₂-powered aviation propulsion technology has moved from the laboratory and ground testing into a real-world flight environment. AECC stated that this achievement demonstrates China’s complete technological chain for H₂-powered aviation engines, from core components to system integration, representing a crucial capability milestone before industrial application.

This technology is more likely in the short-term to be applied in low-altitude scenarios, AECC noted, such as unmanned cargo transport and island logistics. These areas are easier to realize compared to manned aviation in terms of payload, range, certification pressure and operational economics.

Relevant experts pointed out that the successful maiden flight indicates that China has established a complete H₂-powered aviation engine technology system, covering key components to whole-machine integration. This achievement lays the foundation for the industrial application of H₂ energy in the aviation sector.

This news has also been reported by Aviation Week and Fuel Cells Works, among other media outlets.

Source | Metal Chem Inc.

Metal Chem Inc.’s (Greenville, South Carolina) Meta-Plate UCB increases the functionality of RoHS-compliant medium phosphorous electroless nickel. For improved corrosion resistance and higher build applications, Meta-Plate UCB provides a low-to-neutral stress deposit that outperforms existing electroless nickel products.  

Meta-Plate UCB is very user friendly, providing quality deposits and bath stability from a wide window of operation. Always ready to ship and ready to assist, Metal Chem produces products to inventory so customers have products when they need them. Metal Chem also provides customers with consummate technical support from staff with decades of electroless nickel experience.

Metal Chem Inc. | metalchem-inc.com | Booth 326

“We effectively doubled our capacity overnight,” says Nicholas Bass, engineering manager located at the Texas facility near Austin, where I met him last year. “It wasn’t so much an acquisition as a merging of equals.”

Most of what Cumberland Additive added to its fleet from former Stratasys Direct operations did not represent new or different capabilities; rather, the equipment acquisitions have helped to create redundancies, upgrade existing capabilities and, most importantly, enable more throughput for the company.

As a contract manufacturer specializing in powder-based metal and polymer 3D printing, Cumberland Additive has seen significant bounceback and growth post-covid. There are several external factors to that, Bass says, including reduced competition, maturation of the customer base and more streamlined development cycles for AM-suitable applications.

“And we — Cumberland — are ready now in a way we weren’t a few years ago,” he says.

Cumberland Additive’s Pflugerville, Texas, facility operates more than 20 laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) metal 3D printers, in addition to its electron beam melting (EBM) and selective laser sintering (SLS) machines and postprocessing capabilities. Source: Cumberland Additive | All Images

Ready and Able

With its history as part of Arconic, and Alcoa before that, Cumberland’s strength has always been in maintaining technical data and rigor for production 3D printed parts. But now, demand for end-use parts like this (especially in the aerospace, space, energy and defense sectors) ha

s grown to the extent that it has caused the business to expand as well. Having spent the last few years building its capacity and presence across two states, Cumberland is now in position to meet that demand.

Prior to the equipment acquisition described above, the company had opened an outpost at Neighborhood 91 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2022 to take advantage of the N91 additive manufacturing hub that supports end-to-end serial production in one central location. That site continues to operate one Nikon SLM Solutions SLM 500 and two EOS 290 laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) machines as well as an electron beam melting (EBM) system from JEOL.

But in Texas, the scale and scope of the operation are both bigger. While primarily focused on metals, the Pflugerville facility includes a fleet of four polymer selective laser sintering (SLS) systems — DTM Sinterstations that are strategic to the business. These machines are used mainly for lightweight nylon parts required by defense and aerospace customers.

On the metals side, Texas has two additional Arcam EBM machines that are focused on 3D printing of Ti64 titanium, most commonly used for defense applications. One example that Bass shows me on our tour is a part for a military tank, designed to replace a much heavier weldment assembly made from steel.

“You wouldn’t think that weight matters for tanks, but it does,” he says. “Tanks have to be lifted by helicopters and moved into position. Lightweighting is valuable even here.”

Replacing a 30-pound weldment with a lighter titanium part saves weight that can ease transportation, or make room for additions elsewhere.

The primary workhorse machines at Cumberland Additive in Texas are its LPBF 3D printers from Nikon SLM Solutions and EOS. With the recent equipment acquisition, the company now has six SLM 280HL systems, three EOS M400 machines, two EOS M290s and 12 EOS M280s at this location. The company’s most common materials used are Inconel 718, mostly for energy applications, and aluminum alloys and stainless steels, primarily for defense and aerospace customers.

This vacuum furnace and the company’s four heat-treat ovens enable Cumberland Additive to do most heat treating in-house. Parts requiring HIPing are sent to external service providers. 

To support all this additive production, particularly in metals, the Texas facility is also equipped with postprocessing capabilities, many of which have been augmented and improved by the acquisition of Stratasys Direct’s equipment. The location is now equipped with two band saws and three wire EDMs for part cut-off; machine tools for finish machining, including several high-precision models from the acquisition; four heat treat ovens; and a larger vacuum furnace, another result of acquisition.

The addition of the furnace is particularly significant in that it means Cumberland Additive can do any type of heat treatment short of hot isostatic pressing (HIPing) in this facility, which shortens lead times and gives the company better control over its overall workflow.

CNC machining equipment at Cumberland Additive. 

Ongoing Production in Challenging Applications

Cumberland Additive’s Texas production floor is becoming a bit crowded with equipment, but it’s all necessary to the production work the company is doing, spanning multiple industries. I saw a number of complex metal parts being made on the laser powder bed fusion machines during my visit, including:

• Industrial valve components that can now be 3D printed as one piece instead of assembled
• Complex optics housings, a good use case for additive manufacturing because of their need for thermal conductivity and “oddball shapes” restricted by surrounding equipment, Bass says;
• Replacement parts for aircraft, another growing market where additive can deliver equivalent or improved parts for maintenance and repair in a shorter lead-time; and
• Space system components. Cumberland Additive manufactures parts for commercial spacecraft including landing gear components and engine-mounting structures, often from titanium.

“Almost everything we manufacture is a functional part,” Bass says, summarizing the activity on the production floor. The one notable anomaly to this during my visit was a dual-laser SLM 280HL machine that was printing 316L test coupons for a defense agency that will be used to develop material data on AM parts.

The Line Between Science and Production

The test coupons are the exception rather than the rule at Cumberland Additive. Almost all the work coming through the company is production, thanks in part to its legacy of producing high-quality parts for regulated industries. This historic perspective and ongoing focus shapes various aspects of the business, from the customer base served down to the practice of not reusing powder from batch to batch as a means of reducing variability.

Some experimentation is still necessary with the science-heavy nature of additive manufacturing, but Cumberland limits this activity to answering only the most necessary questions for the job at hand.

“We need to move fast and be cost-aware,” Bass notes. “We have to do some research as questions arise, but everything goes toward a P.O.”

“You’re not going to find the corners of the process,” he says to manufacturing engineers when these experiments are necessary. “It’s about finding the range that matters for production.”

Cumberland Additive does not design parts, but it can execute almost everything else in the additive manufacturing workflow that follows from printing to inspection to machining.  

That relentless focus on production also plays into the one service Cumberland does not provide: design.

“We even exclude design from AS9100,” Bass says, which serves as a signal to customers that Cumberland Additive is not competing with them on IP and development.

All of this — the focus on regulated industries, the pursuit of AM knowledge only in service of AM production, and separation from design — has enabled Cumberland Additive to narrow in on steady, higher-volume applications and unlock economies of scale that now serve its customers. 

“Additive manufacturing is still very expensive if you just want to make two of something. By the time you figure in the printing and all of the postprocessing, it’s costly,” Bass says. “For us, the volumes are what make the costs work.”

A scale model of Boeing’s Subsonic Ultra Green Aircraft Research concept undergoes testing in a 5-meter wind tunnel operated by the company QinetiQ in December 2025. Source | QinetiQ

NASA (Washington, D.C., U.S.) and Boeing (Arlington, Va., U.S.) have completed wind tunnel testing on the truss-braced wing (TTBW) configuration, an advanced aircraft design intended to improve aerodynamic efficiency.

Working on this together for more than a decade, the TTBW involves a long, thin wing with aerodynamically shaped structural supports for reducing fuel and operational costs for future airliners. Because it requires a major redesign for aircraft the size of a passenger jet, the concept requires extensive study. 

The most recent round of testing used a complex wind tunnel model to collect data on how air flows around a truss-braced wing model and the forces that would be exerted on such a wing in flight. The test used a semispan model — essentially half an aircraft mounted on a wind tunnel floor. The model has features built in to simulate the mechanisms that increase the amount of lift a wing produces. By adjusting the model’s slats, flaps and other moving control surfaces, the team can configure it to the low-speed, high-lift settings of takeoff and landing conditions.

The model is part of a collaboration to test what’s known as Boeing’s Subsonic Ultra Green Aircraft Research (SUGAR) concept.

In December 2025, teams completed testing of the model wind tunnel operated by QinetiQ (Farnborough, U.K.). This large wind tunnel uses pressurized conditions to predict airplane behavior in takeoff and landing conditions. The tunnel’s large size gives the model fidelity to better predict the behavior of a plane in flight. 

NASA and Boeing research teams analyzed data in real time to ensure the model performed as expected. Researchers are still reviewing the full results, but the test has already added valuable information to a growing body of research aimed at reducing fuel use in future aircraft designs.

Moreover, the testing was just the latest stop for this research. NASA and Boeing have tested the concept at multiple NASA facilities to collect data as the partners work to build a comprehensive understanding of this advanced airframe concept.

NOTE: Work began in NASA’s Advanced Air Vehicles Program and continues as part of the Subsonic Flight Demonstrator project under the Integrated Aviation Systems Program in the agency’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate.

Source | Otto Aerospace

Otto Aerospace (formerly Otto Aviation, Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.) has completed the flight testing campaign for its unmanned drone aircraft designed around the company’s laminar-flow technology, which reduces aerodynamic drag by maintaining smooth, uninterrupted airflow over an aircraft’s surfaces. It was conducted from Spaceport America in New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) airspace, and validated the design technology’s predicted aerodynamic efficiency.

The aircraft structure is fabricated entirely from carbon fiber composites, with select S-glass fiberglass “window” sections integrated into the outer skin to enable reliable radio and GPS transmission through the airframe without the excess drag associated with externally mounted antennas. Using net-shape composite tooling, the team produced near-pristine parts directly from the mold with minimal finishing required. The outer skins were manufactured in large integrated sections, with much of the structure bonded or built directly into the skin, creating smooth, aerodynamic surfaces by minimizing traditional steps, gaps, panel breaks and fastener imperfections — key to maintaining laminar airflow and reducing drag.

The drone was funded in part under a 24-month contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Operational Energy Capability Improvement Fund (OECIF) to advance research for DARPA’s Energy Web Aircraft (EWA) program. Centered around power-beaming and distributed energy web exploration, the EWA program sought to enable laser-based power transfer across long distances by using airborne relays to beam energy to aircraft potentially keeping them aloft indefinitely. This flight testing campaign in particular was an Otto Aerospace-funded development effort, conducted independently and outside the scope of the DARPA and OECIF contract.

Otto’s role focused on developing a highly laminar-flow-efficient airframe. The program leveraged Otto’s aerodynamic expertise to design and flight-test an unmanned vehicle that could inform design parameters for future energy-relay systems or more fuel-efficient, long-endurance platforms, in addition to Otto’s own commercial and defense programs.

“This aircraft proved what we’ve modeled for years — that high-efficiency laminar-flow aerodynamics can deliver high endurance and performance,” says Scott Drennan, president and CEO of Otto Aerospace.

Flight operations were conducted in partnership with Swift Engineering (San Clememte, Calif., U.S.) which managed vehicle preparation and coordinated range and telemetry support. Swift’s established presence at Spaceport America and extensive experience with high-altitude UAVs helped Otto carry out multiple sorties over WSMR airspace.

Source | Otto Aerospace

Otto Aerospace (Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.) has successfully completed preliminary design review (PDR) for its Phantom 3500, a major technical milestone that advances the clean sheet business jet program from conceptual design into detailed design and production planning. The review was conducted during the last week of February 2026 at Otto Aerospace’s future home in Jacksonville, Florida.

PDR provided a comprehensive assessment of the Phantom 3500’s configuration, architecture, performance and overall design maturity across systems and structures. It also enabled Otto to freeze the aircraft’s aerodynamic design and major interfaces, giving engineering and supplier teams the definition needed to support the next phase of work.

“This is an important step for our team,” says Otto Aerospace president and CEO Scott Drennan. “Engineers often feel like PDR is a test, but I look at it as a celebration of their work. And, yes, they passed the test with flying colors. The Phantom 3500 has crossed the threshold from a promising concept to an aircraft we are preparing to build and fly. You can see it in the digital model, in the hardware we have built and in the maturity of the program. The work now is execution.”

Otto now advances the program into detailed design and engineering release, setting the stage for hardware fabrication and assembly as the company prepares for first flight of Flight Test Vehicle 1 in 2027. The flight test program will support Otto’s broader effort to demonstrate the producibility and performance of its applied laminar-flow technology, which is engineered to radically reduce the energy required for flight and form the foundation for a new category of highly efficient and sustainable aviation.

As the program moves from PDR toward critical design review (CDR) and aircraft build, Otto will remain focused on the work required to turn the Phantom 3500 into a certified production aircraft, including disciplined weight management, supplier execution, certification planning and protection of the aircraft’s core performance targets.

Source | Otto Aerospace

Otto Aerospace (Fort Worth, Texas, U.S.) has partnered with F/List GmbH (Thomasberg, Austria) to develop the interior for the Phantom 3500. The clean sheet, ultra-efficient business jet leverages laminar-flow aerodynamics and carbon fiber composites to deliver a 61% reduction in fuel burn compared with current super-midsize aircraft.

Under the agreement, F/List, a global provider of high-end interiors for commercial aviation, business and private jets as well as residences, will lead the development and production of the aircraft’s interior furniture and linings, working closely with Otto during the earliest stages of design. The company’s expertise in advanced carbon fiber composite construction and premium cabin creation supports Otto’s goal to develop a lightweight interior that is fully aligned with the aircraft’s performance architecture.

“Because the Phantom is a clean sheet aircraft, the interior isn’t constrained by legacy layouts or systems,” notes Olivier Capistran, principal engineer – interiors, furnishings and equipment at Otto Aerospace. “Working with F/List at this stage allows us to incorporate interior design directly into the aircraft architecture, so the cabin experience reflects the same performance and efficiency the platform is built to deliver.”

Rather than following a traditional supplier model, where vendors are brought in after concepts are finalized and the process shifts into a standard RFI/RFP cycle, Otto and F/List are defining requirements together from the start. This ensures the interior is fully integrated with the aircraft’s structure and systems, giving engineers and designers the opportunity to reduce weight and improve efficiency while delivering a more imaginative, forward-thinking and cohesive cabin experience.

Anita Gradwohl, group director customer relations and sales at F/List says the company is applying its expertise in crafting bio-based materials and integrating bold concepts. 

The Phantom 3500 is currently in development, with first flight targeted for 2027 and entry into service planned for 2030.

Matthias Mayer-Kriehuber and Sandra Schlögl from PCCL and Peter Wagner from Isovolta. Source |Styrian Economic Development Corporation (SFG) 

The research institute Polymer Competence Center Leoben (PCCL, Leoben, Austria), in collaboration with global materials technology and composite materials supplier Isovolta (Wiener Neudorf, Austria), have been awarded the Styrian Innovation Prize 2026 in the category “Sustainability: R&D institutions.” This award recognizes their work to achieve economic and large-scale production of recyclable fiber-reinforced and polymer-based composite materials based on polymers and prepregs made with an epoxy equipped with dynamic covalent bonds — also referred to as a vitrimer.

Read more about vitrimers: “Reprocessable thermosets and thermoplastic epoxies”

The joint research and industry collaboration has succeeded for the first time in the economical production of recyclable fiber-reinforced vitrimer-based composite materials for the aviation industry. Thanks to the distinctive chemistry of vitrimers, this new generation of composites combine the properties of classic crosslinked thermosets (which cannot be repaired, reshaped or recycled due to their covalent network structure) with the processing properties of thermoplastics (ability to be remelted, reshaped, welded and more readily recycled).

These new composite materials are characterized by:

• High mechanical strength and fire resistance.
• Opportunity for maintenance and recycling of interior components.
• Increased service life thanks to increased repairability.
• More efficient production methods such as thermoforming semi-finished products.
• Energy savings from transport and handling at ambient conditions — i.e., no frozen storage required.
• Adjustable geometry for on-site assembly.

This material development is based on commercially available epoxy resins that are equipped with dynamic covalent bonds. Thermal activation of these groups induces a viscoelastic flow of the material without changing the average crosslink density. The temperature-dependent control of the physical properties is subsequently used for production, assembly, repair and/or recycling, including easy separation of the fibers from the polymer matrix for circular fiber-reinforced composites.

This development has been successfully transferred from the laboratory scale to industrial production and is being advanced toward commercialization in multiple markets.

Source | Pilatus Aircraft

Pilatus Aircraft Ltd. (Stans, Switzerland) marks the start of construction for the company’s facility being built at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Broomfield, Colorado. The building will house a premium customer delivery center, where customers from all over the country can configure and personalize their PC-12 or PC-24 aircraft. Additionally, Pilatus will significantly expand its existing engineering and passenger seat processing capabilities for the growing fleet.

Under the $50 million-invested project, sustainability is a key element and core value for Pilatus. The facility has been designed to achieve LEED Gold certification and will incorporate photovoltaic panels to harness solar energy, reflecting the company’s commitment to responsible growth and environmentally conscious operations.

Effective Jan. 1, 2026, Pilatus consolidated its U.S. subsidiaries into a single entity, Pilatus Aircraft USA Ltd., creating a unified organization of approximately 400 employees with harmonized systems across all U.S. operations. The company’s U.S. footprint includes its headquarters in Broomfield, Colorado, as well as additional locations in Westminster (Maryland), Rock Hill (South Carolina) and Atlanta (Georgia). Pilatus also broke ground on its fifth U.S. facility, based in Florida, in February.

Source | Piper Aircraft

Piper Aircraft (Vero Beach, Fla., U.S.) has announced that the advanced seven-blade MT‑Propeller produced by MT-Propeller Entwicklung GmbH (Atting, Germany) has received European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) supplemental type certificate (STC) approval for the Piper M700 Fury aircraft with Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) certification expected in the near future.

Designed with composite materials and aerodynamic efficiency, the seven-blade MT‑Propeller enhances both performance and cabin comfort, offering pilots a refined and responsive flight profile as well as notable performance improvements, including decreased takeoff distance, higher climb rate and a quieter cabin.

MT-Propeller Entwicklung GmbH was founded in 1981 by Gerd Muehlbauer and is well known in the world of general aviation as a manufacturer of natural composite propellers for single- and twin-engine aircraft, airships, wind tunnels and other special applications.

“Integrating the seven-blade MT‑Propeller into the Fury platform underscores Piper’s commitment to continuous innovation and customer‑driven enhancements.” — Marc Ouellet, VP of Engineering and Manufacturing for Piper Aircraft

Piper Aircraft’s single-engine M-Class series — the M700 Fury, M500 and M350 — offers businesses and individuals high performance, value and ownership experience. Piper is a member of the General Aviation Manufacturers Association.

REGENT Defense Squire Seaglider drone performs a flight demonstration in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. Source | REGENT Defense

REGENT (Regional Electric Ground Effect Nautical Transport Craft Inc. in North Kingstown, R.I., U.S.), the developer and manufacturer of carbon fiber composite Seaglider vessels, has successfully completed a ground-effect flight of Squire, its autonomous Seaglider drone built for defense missions. This milestone reportedly represents the first time a defense-specific wing-in-ground effect (WIG) craft has flown in the U.S., positioning REGENT to overtake China in this critical technology space.

The flight demonstration marks the latest achievement in REGENT’s ongoing Squire test campaign and underscores the company’s deliberate prioritization of the platform in response to urgent defense needs. REGENT is advancing Squire and other defense-specific Seaglider vessels to support the U.S. and its allies with modern maritime capabilities.

Seaglider vessels are WIG craft that fly on an aerodynamically efficient cushion of air within a wingspan of the surface of the water, enabling efficient, long-range performance that is below line-of-sight radar. With speeds up to 70 knots (81 miles per hour), a planned operational range of more than 100 nautical miles and a 50-pound payload, Squire can enable critical defense missions including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) as well as tailored logistics, anti-submarine warfare and search and rescue.

Defense customers require platforms that can operate across wide maritime areas with speed, range and mission flexibility. Squire is designed to meet that exact need. This demonstration shows real progress toward delivering high-speed autonomous missions capability.

Interest in Squire and the broader REGENT Defense portfolio continues to grow. The U.S. government has highlighted the importance of emerging defense companies like REGENT that are moving with speed to deliver mission-ready capabilities to the field.

Source | easyJet

EasyJet (Bedfordshire, U.K.) and Rolls-Royce (London, U.K.) have successfully completed aeroengine testing using hydrogen as an aviation fuel. In what the companies claim is an “industry first,” a modified Rolls-Royce Pearl 15 aircraft engine reached full takeoff power while running on 100% hydrogen, at NASA’s Stennis Space Center, near Bay St. Louis Mississippi.

The 4-year program between Rolls-Royce, easyJet and global partners is significant for the role it is playing generating engineering insight for future hydrogen-based propulsion applications, including single-aisle aircraft. 

The focus of this phase being to validate combustion, fuel and control system technologies, materials used in this modified engine were not discussed, though traditionally Pearl 15 engines feature composite bypass ducts for the turbofans supplied by FACC (Innkreis, Austria) as of 2018.

During this phase of the testing program, engineers demonstrated that a modern jet engine, scalable to power a narrowbody aircraft, can safely operate on gaseous hydrogen across a fully simulated flight cycle, including startup, takeoff, cruise and landing.

The Rolls-Royce program followed an incremental, technology-led approach to prove the fundamental technologies. Progressing from early engine testing at Boscombe Down in the U.K. in 2022, the technology was scaled and further developed through a U.K. and European program of component and system rig tests, including the development of a full-scale hydrogen test facility at the HSE, before moving to full integration into a hydrogen-fueled demonstrator engine. Earlier modifications also focused on adapting the engine to replace traditional jet fuel with hydrogen while considering both carbon and non-CO₂ impacts through an expansive combustion program.

“This program has given us the clearest understanding in the industry of how hydrogen behaves in a modern aero gas turbine,” says Adam Newton, chief engineer, hydroen demonstrator program, Rolls-Royce. “We have explored a wide range of operating conditions, including fault scenarios, enabling operation at maximum power and across a full flight cycle. The pace of delivery has been critical, and the insights gained, many of which are fuel-agnostic, will now be applied across our future programs, including UltraFan, strengthening our confidence that the gas turbine will remain at the forefront of sustainable aviation’s future.”

Shown above is Safran Seats Unity, a current Business Class suite. Source | SHD Composites

SHD Composites (Sleaford, U.K.), a Cambium company, announces its role in EcoSuite, an initiative developing next‑gen aircraft seating through sustainable materials and advanced manufacturing. SHD will supply its composites expertise with FR308 — a bio‑based, fully FST‑compliant resin system for aircraft interiors, derived from cane sugar production waste streams.

EcoSuite unites Safran Seats GB, the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), the Aerospace Technology Institute (ATI), Innovate UK and other leading U.K. industry and academic partners — a consortium combining U.K. innovation with Safran Group’s (Paris, France) global engineering capability to deliver aircraft seating solutions that are high performance and environmentally responsible.

The project secured ATI Programme funding at the Paris Airshow in 2025, the first direct investment in aircraft seating. This support reinforces the U.K.’s aerospace ambitions and aligns with ATI’s Destination Zero strategy to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

According to SHD, FR308, reinforced with 300 gsm glass fiber, delivers significant sustainability and health and safety advantages over traditional phenolic prepregs. Free from formaldehyde, phenol and organic solvents, its bio‑based formulation contributes to a reduced carbon footprint. Supported by a detailed cradle-to-gate analysis covering raw material sourcing to material dispatch, FR308 is an ideal lower-carbon material choice for aircraft interiors.

Source | SPE ACCE

The SPE Automotive Composites Conference & Expo (ACCE) executive planning committee welcomes the 2026 event’s first keynote speaker, Jeff Bosworth, senior manager – X-Bat structures lead at Shield AI (San Diego, Calif., U.S.).

Bosworth’s presentation, “Fly by: Aerospace composites for an automotive audience” will be a high-level discussion of how composites are essential in making modern aircraft, especially vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) platforms. Attendees can expect to learn about the basics of design philosophy, nuances of analysis and multiple manufacturing techniques, as well as some speculation about where the aerospace composites industry will go over the next decade. 

The X-Bat is an AI-piloted (unmanned) VTOL fighter jet that “reimagines airpower” —  from training and logistics to operations and operating costs.  With VTOL, long range and full autonomy, X-Bat delivers combat power anywhere, anytime.

The platform will the leading edge of a distributed unmanned fires network, capable of launching and recovering from ships, remote islands or austere forward bases while eliminating dependency on traditional infrastructure. X-Bat can carry both air-to-air and air-to-surface weapons in its internal bays and carry large strike weapons on external hardpoints.  

“The VTOL market is a great opportunity for automotive composites suppliers to expand,” says Bosworth. “I believe this presentation will enlighten the industry to new opportunities for growth and be inspiring.”

Boeing 777X. Source | Getty Images

In a landmark achievement, Strata Syensqo Advanced Materials (SSAM, Al Ain, UAE), the joint venture between Strata Manufacturing PJSC (Strata, Al Ain) and Belgium’s Syensqo (Brussels), has demonstrated the successful large-scale production of carbon fiber prepreg materials intended for the manufacture of test components at Boeing for the 777X program, under a long-term supply agreement with Boeing (Arlington, Va., U.S.). 

“Guided by our vision to localize and strengthen high-value industries in the UAE, we continue to expand our production capabilities under the National Strategy for Industry and Advanced Technology, in alignment with the objectives of the ‘Make it in the Emirates’ initiative,” says Sara Abdulla Al Memari, acting CEO of Strata.

According to Khaled Saif Al Nuaimi, engineering and maintenance manager at Strata Syensqo, the Al Ain facility is “the first of its kind in the Middle East” and is set up to manufacture various grades of prepreg rolls to meet the specific component manufacturing processes at the customer’s end (the joint venture facility was completed in 2020).

Production is executed across five key stages. The process begins with the creation of industrial resin under vacuum and pressure at elevated temperatures. This is followed by coating ultra-thin layers of resin onto paper sheets, which are then rolled and stored at sub-zero temperatures. In the third stage, carbon fibers are embedded between resin-coated layers under high pressure and heat, resulting in carbon fiber prepreg. The material is then cut into customer-specific dimensions before undergoing final packaging and cold storage to preserve its integrity prior to shipment.

Al Nuaimi emphasizes that Strata Syensqo represents an innovative model in advanced manufacturing, driven by the integration of cutting-edge technologies and intelligent production systems. All products undergo rigorous quality assurance at Strata Syensqo laboratories in Al Ain prior to delivery, ensuring compliance with the highest global standards.

He further highlights the critical role of Emirati talent in the project, noting that a highly skilled national workforce operates across production, quality, engineering and maintenance functions. These teams have undergone specialized training in leading facilities in Germany and the U.K., enabling knowledge transfer and empowering them to lead operations within the UAE.

Dr. Bill Carter, VP of advanced production automation technology at Boeing Engineering & Technology, delivered the keynote address at SAMPE 2026. Source | CW

If there was one phrase you couldn’t escape while walking the aisles, sitting in technical sessions or eavesdropping on hallway conversations at SAMPE 2026, it was this: high rate. From the opening general session, and through 3 days of panels, paper presentations and exhibition floor demonstrations, the composites community made clear that the central challenge of this moment is no longer whether advanced materials belong in aerospace and defense platforms — that question was settled long ago — but whether the industry can produce them fast enough, consistently enough and at sufficient scale to meet what is shaping up to be an extraordinary decade of demand.

SAMPE has always positioned itself as a place where academia, industry and government intersect, and this year’s edition leaned hard into that identity. Co-hosted by the SAMPE Seattle and Carolinas chapters, the program spanned more than 100 technical sessions, two panels and hands-on tutorials, with content stretching from fundamental research through scale-up to full production.

From the outset, the tone of the week was set by the keynote delivered by Dr. Bill Carter, VP of advanced production automation technology at Boeing Engineering & Technology, formerly of HRL and DARPA (where he ran portfolios in hypersonics, space manufacturing and scalable nanomaterials).

Carter opened with an image of a structure full of stringers, frames and floor beams — which turned out to be a ~1400 BC Egyptian funerary boat sealed with tensioned reeds. His point: The materials and process problems we wrestle with today — gap fill, tolerance stack-up, joining dissimilar materials, organizing humans around complex builds — are millennia old. What’s new is the urgency. From a defense perspective, in the midst of major conflict, existing inventory disappears in weeks, leaving manufacturing capacity as the decisive national capability.

Carter walked through his new, deliberately systems-focused organization spanning design support, digital production, robotics, process automation, 3D measurement, NDT automation and scientific imaging — built on the premise that production risk has to be understood end-to-end. Boeing’s approach involves a “hub-and-spoke” data architecture, autonomous error-correcting robotics and quantum computing for materials modeling, Carter explained. And all of these technologies are geared toward encouraging curiosity, taking risks and using modeling and the documented experience of others to streamline the advancement of technology.

Carter closed with a fear that keeps him up at night: a future major conflict where the U.S. industrial base can’t surge fast enough. According to Carter, working to streamline production processes to avoid this scenario not only help to safeguard us from such a vulnerable position, but also afford us the opportunity to fundamentally rethink aerospace production.

What does this mean for where the composites community sits in mid-2026? The technical focus of the industry has shifted to some degree. Fiber, resin and process innovation continue to be important — but the most momentum in the industry surrounds contextualized factory data, AI-assisted inspection, autonomous robotics, digital twins extended into the supply base and qualification pathways that support new technology maturation without holding rate hostage.

The aerospace and defense pull is unmistakable. High-rate commercial production ramps, autonomous and uncrewed platforms, hypersonics, space launch and a defense industrial base under acute pressure to demonstrate surge capacity have become the backdrop of nearly every high-rate composites conversation.

The cultural question of whether the industry can recover what Carter called a certain “audacity” seen in early spaceflight — a willingness to assume some level of risk-taking and failure as part of the process of innovation —  while honoring the safety discipline that aerospace requires is being forced to the forefront of how we get things done. It’s a reminder that events like SAMPE are a vital gathering place to put the right people in the same room long enough to make the next round of progress possible.

Source | Toray, Syensqo

Toray Composite Materials America, Inc. (Tacoma, Wash., U.S.), a Toray Group company specializing in polyacrylonitrile (PAN)-based carbon fiber and carbon fiber prepreg, has entered into a long-term carbon fiber supply agreement with Syensqo SA (Brussels, Belgium).

Through this 5-year agreement, which took effect in January 2026, both companies will work to enhance supply stability and resilience across aircraft, space and defense applications, strengthening the global supply chain and contributing to long-term market growth.

With the recovery of global passenger demand and progress in next-generation aircraft development, the aircraft market is expected to maintain stable medium- to long-term growth. The renewal and advancement of aircraft is also continuing to progress, thus driving firm growth in carbon fiber demand.

Amid a rapidly changing global environment, Toray Group remains committed to strengthening its long-term stable supply to meet the increasing demand of carbon fiber for the aerospace industry.

For more information, visit www.toray.com.

Source | Uavos Inc.

Uavos Inc. (Dover, Del., U.S.) is supplying high-performance rotor blades to U.S. aerospace startups participating in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Lift Challenge, which calls on developers to design and build an unmanned helicopter capable of carrying four times its own weight. In this effort, Uavos is supporting participants as a technology and supply partner, providing rotor blades engineered to meet the demanding performance standards required for advanced, heavy-lift unmanned rotorcraft.

Uavos rotor blades are manufactured using a construction approach based on its latest carbon fiber multi-cross-layer technology, without additional mechanical processing. This design ensures optimal geometric stability, structural reliability and consistent performance under challenging operating conditions.

Blades also incorporate the NACA 23012 airfoil, selected by Uavos engineers for its aerodynamic efficiency and enhanced performance under high-load conditions. Special attention has also been given to blade twist optimization, a critical factor in rotorcraft efficiency. Optimized twist geometry helps reduce power consumption and improve flight endurance, key advantages for heavy-lift unmanned helicopter platforms. 

Uavos rotor blades have also been tested for overload resistance and environmental reliability by an independent European laboratory, further confirming their suitability. The blades offer a proven service life of 3,000 hours.

For related content, read about the Jetoptera drone, a participating company in the DARPA competition supported by Walter Pritzkow OCMC.

For additional margin, shorter pi joint segments were installed under the upper wing skins as well, where the wing dihedral transitions to a level dog-bone-shaped laminate that bridges across the aircraft cockpit. Source (All Images) | DarkAero Inc.

The DarkAero 1 is a prototype high-speed, long-range, experimental kit aircraft designed and manufactured by DarkAero Inc. (Madison, Wis., U.S.). Development includes an extensive load test campaign to verify the all-composite airframe’s structural integrity prior to high-speed flight testing. Flight test campaign planning and ground tests identified that the center wing box butt joints and flap control system mount rigidity would require modification prior to flight. A new solution was needed.

The DarkAero 1 center wing box now relies on pi joints to stabilize the center wing skins while under compression. The challenge of this structural retrofit created an engineering playground riddled with rigorous design constraints from initial conception to in-house static load testing of the full wing assembly.

Note from Ginger Gardiner, CW executive editor: This technical article was written by Ryan Stube, chief engineer for DarkAero, and is published mostly as he submitted it. However, I have also inserted short segments from my initial discussion with him that, to me, also tell the human side of the engineering story, which I find fascinating. Also, watch the video near the end, which features Stube, and is why I reached out to DarkAero in the first place.

Who is DarkAero?

The DarkAero 1 prototype aircraft prior to beginning a thorough ground test campaign.

Ginger Gardiner (GG): It started with the idea of building the fastest, longest-range composite aircraft you can build in a garage. The founders — three brothers with degrees in aerospace, mechanical and electrical engineering — wanted to fly from the Midwest to either coast as a weekend trip. That evolved into the DarkAero 1, a prototype side-by-side, two-seat aircraft aimed to cruise at 275 miles per hour with a 1,700-mile range.

Stube explains that one of the brothers was building an experimental aircraft from a plans-built kit, which required a lot of fabrication knowledge and thousands of hours of work starting from raw materials. A more appealing alternative is known as a quick build kit where builders bond subassemblies together straight from the factory. Thus, DarkAero started out as an experimental kit aircraft company, with the plan to supply parts and subassemblies for composite aircraft to individual builders.

However, through developing the DarkAero 1, the company’s skills, capabilities and team grew, says Stube. “We now teach aerospace composites manufacturing and moldmaking courses. That led to working with students on a variety of projects, including planes, boats and cars. We also provide services where we help with design, build tooling or even fabricate entire airframes. This contract work has led to continual growth, and the company is always looking for driven individuals to join our team.”

Wet wing design, butt joint assembly

Ryan Stube (RS): Although not required by governing regulations for experimental category aircraft, DarkAero’s internal standards are more reflective of a certified aircraft program. Development of the DarkAero 1 has been working through an extensive load test campaign to ensure adequate structural integrity of the all-composite airframe prior to flight testing. In parallel, the flight test campaign and respective flight envelope are being formalized.

GG: The speed and range requirements for the DarkAero 1 drove the wing to be somewhat of a new approach, “because we focus on manufacturing just as much as design, targeting an empty weight of 750 pounds — roughly half of what a comparable size Lancair would weigh,” says Stube. The plane’s fast cruise also places a lot of aerodynamic loads on the structure.

RS: The prototype wing with 23-foot, 5-inch wingspan is an all-bonded, carbon fiber-reinforced composite assembly that weighs in at just over 100 pounds. The original stressed skin design relied primarily on the skins themselves and then secondarily on a hollow grid internal structure to prevent skin buckling. However, instead of having a bunch of individually molded ribs — which would require a lot of labor to produce — we use honeycomb-cored panels made in-house from 4 × 8-foot sheets that are CNC routed into the 2D shapes we need for both the wing and fuselage. We then bond these together using controlled surface preparation, epoxy paste adhesive and a proprietary assembly process to form a grid of simple butt joints.

The DarkAero 1 center wing section showing curved region (red lines) where airfoil cross-section blends into the fuselage body (top left). Red arrows show the primary in-plane loading of the lower wing skin under negative g-loads and the respective secondary out-of-plane loading condition (bottom left). This secondary condition comes from the lower wing skin having eccentrically loaded curved panel geometry near the wing root which places the center shear web joints in tension. FEA, for illustration only, shows an aft view of the pilot side wing root under the same loads (right). The red arrow indicates where the lower wing skin deforms away from the rest of the structure.

The wing is also a 77-gallon fuel tank spanning from the wing roots to tips. The lower wing skin is a single part — from wing tip to wing tip — while the upper wing skins are two separate parts with a dog-bone-shaped central member transferring loads between them in the fuselage/center wing box. The lower wing skin also forms the cockpit floor and skin of the fuselage below the center wing box. This means the lower wing skin geometry seamlessly transitions between an airfoil profile and the fuselage profile near the wing root. The hollow grid structure of bonded honeycomb cored panel butt joints to the skins continued through the center section of the wing box via five honeycomb shear webs. With this structure, the wing passed initial positive and negative-g static proof load testing.

Necessary redesign in center wing box butt joints

RS: However, as mentioned above, in formalizing the flight test envelope, it became apparent that we needed to increase the wing’s ultimate lift load strength to resist vertical gusts, which presents an equal probability of abruptly increased lift in both the positive and negative directions. Increasing the proof load value meant the center region of the wing would experience higher secondary bending stresses primarily due to the inherent curvature of the lower wing skin. These stresses induce out-of-plane loading during negative-g lift conditions while the lower wing skin laminate is in compression. Having an aerodynamically clean transition between the wing and fuselage helps reduce drag, but it creates a difficult structural problem when using an all-bonded, stressed skin design with a locally curved load path.

GG: There is curvature in this lower wing skin panel without any inherent stability. “It’s basically an unsupported panel,” notes Stube. “So, our problem became how much do I need to support this eccentrically loaded panel? It’s curved, and that problem is always hard to analyze and hard to define, because even though the material itself could handle the tensile and compressive loads that it will see in flight, it’s eccentrically loaded and wants to buckle.” So, internal structural resistance to out-of-plane loading was still needed to prevent that buckling from occurring.

RS: Through the structural deformation modes observed during previous static wing load tests, we recognized that the first failure mechanism of the wing at higher loads was the out-of-plane tensile strength of the butt joints between the center shear webs and the lower wing skin where the fuselage body curvature blends with the wing airfoil. Outboard of this central region, the upper and lower wing skins are nearly parallel to each other and do not have inherent buckling tendencies or instabilities. Therefore, modification to pass additional proof load testing was focused on the center region of the wing and a new joint method between the lower wing skin and the center shear webs.

Pi joints as a solution

GG: Butt joints were originally chosen because it’s an easier manufacturing technique when you know you have an appropriate margin of safety, says Stube. But they also knew there are stronger joints than a simple butt joint.

 

Cross-sections of butt joint (top) and pi joint (bottom) element test specimens prior to pull testing in a universal test machine. The honeycomb panels and base laminates replicate the existing materials in the original DarkAero 1 prototype wing structure. 

RS: Pi joints more evenly transfer the out-of-plane loading conditions into double lap-shear joints. This is ideal, as paste adhesives for assembly are much stronger in shear than peel or tensile loading. With the requirement of maintaining the honeycomb shear web architecture to preserve existing structural analysis efforts, pi joints tailored to the honeycomb panel dimensions showed a potentially promising solution to the problem.

The DarkAero 1 had not previously used pi joints anywhere in the airframe due to the more labor-intensive manufacturing methods required to produce the joint geometry. The aircraft primarily relies on vacuum-assisted resin transfer molding (VARTM) and unsupported post-cure of complete composite assemblies. With the budget-constrained resources available when the original prototype airframe was built, complicated composite parts were reduced to a minimum, and the aircraft was designed with low-cost, high-quality manufacturing in mind. Developments in room temperature storage, out-of-autoclave (OOA) epoxy prepregs now allow for more complicated prototype composite part fabrication while still maintaining relatively low cost.

One of the first steps toward implementing pi joints in the DarkAero 1 wing was to perform a brief feasibility study, laying the foundation for the entire structural retrofit. Pi joint manufacturing techniques, joint strength characterization, detail-level test specimen laminate changes, existing wing structure deconstruction, new structure installation and assembly post-cure were all worked through prior to seriously pursuing the pi joint structural retrofit. With a rough but feasible path forward in mind, initial structural characterization tests started with simple element-level joint pull tests in a universal test machine.

As-manufactured element laminates for load testing

GG: Although DarkAero hadn’t made pi joints for this exact use case, it had used the intended materials and manufacturing techniques for other applications. “At the end of the day, we needed to make sure that we could not only build them but also create an assembly that worked for this redesign and then we had to test that assembly,” says Stube. “That was why we took the physical approach of ‘build it and break it.’ Then, we just followed the basic building block pyramid to move up the scale in specimen testing.”

RS: Although DarkAero has finite element analysis (FEA) and computer simulation capabilities, because the wing redesign would still require physical test specimens to be manufactured and tested, it was more efficient to rely more heavily on real-word data from a limited physical test program. Preliminary test samples were manufactured using variables specific to the DarkAero 1 wing. The pi joint base laminate would be secondary bonded with an assembly paste adhesive to the existing prototype lower wing skin — a resin-infused, post-cured plain weave spread tow laminate. To accurately simulate the substrate’s future surface energy properties during eventual pi joint installation, composite laminate sections for element-level testing were manufactured using the same fabric, infusion epoxy and post-cure as the actual lower wing skin.

With composites, the final assembly strength properties are not only determined by the physical materials being used, but also the exact fabrication and joining processes as well. Preliminary plans relied on vacuum bagging to introduce clamping pressure while the assembly adhesive cured during pi joint installation into the existing center wing section geometry. With the original center wing box structure removed, the lower wing skin mold was used to serve as the support fixture for maintaining the left and right wing dihedral and incidence angles.

Although intricate clamping fixtures could have been built to interface with the mold structure, it was more efficient and reliable to use the pressure differential of a vacuum bag to apply uniform clamping pressure during assembly. Even though element-level test samples are typically small and, in this case, could have been bonded together using simple hand clamps, the intended vacuum bagging method was still used to produce the samples. This means the initial database testing would more accurately simulate the uniform bondline thickness and environmental-related strength properties of what the wing structure would likely have due to curing under vacuum. Initial element-level testing showed promising out-of-plane strength increases compared to estimated new joint strength requirements and provided enough assurance to further pursue pi joints.

Advancing pi joint design, multiple performance improvements

RS: Instead of heavily relying on new computer simulations to instruct joint build parameters, the original wing design model and new approximate calculations were used to loosely guide the joint design toward the new strength requirements. Additional element testing included characterizing the sensitivity of the pi joint configuration to foreseeable potential manufacturing deficiencies as well as laminate design refinement. Variables such as honeycomb panel shear web bondline thickness and clamping pressure or joint dimensional tolerance and fit-up were quickly tested to create approximate acceptance criteria for the prototype wing components. Laminate design parameters including the unidirectional (UD) noodle cross-sectional area and ply orientation sequencing were varied to briefly refine the joint performance.

At the conclusion of the element-level testing, the out-of-plane first failure strength of the pi joint between the honeycomb panel and wing skin increased by more than 300% compared to the original butt joint ultimate strength. This was not the only performance improvement, however.

The butt joint test specimen failure mode was a subtle first indication of failure, with very limited strength and stiffness decrease and within about 85% of ultimate failure, which occurred via cohesive failure at the lower substrate or failure in the lower laminate. In contrast, the pi joint test specimens experienced a first failure through delamination near or through the UD noodles. This first failure showed a brief decrease in reaction load due to the resulting increased elasticity and then continued to withstand lower levels of out-of-plane loading while additional failure occurred. Ultimate failure of the pi joints had higher variance than their first failure, but still measured more than 250% higher than the butt joint ultimate strength. Nearly all pi joint ultimate failures were via delamination between the upright and pi joint base laminate plies instead of disbond failures at the bondline or surface of the simulated lower wing skin.

 

Multi-pi joint structures prior to installation in the center wing. These primary structural elements are manufactured using out-of-autoclave, room temperature storage prepreg. These had to be made in three separate sections to enable proper installation due to the physical space constraints in the center wing area.  

With the joint strength, materials and assembly methods characterized, development efforts transitioned to brief, detail-level tests of multi-pi joints. These are a closely spaced (2 inches apart center-to-center) series of parallel pi joints comprising the five center shear webs in the DarkAero 1 wing. With a further understanding of more central wing box assembly-specific load characteristics, the team manufactured, inspected and installed larger sections of multi-pi joints in the center wing.

Dimensional and manufacturing process constraints initially seemed to reduce the probability of successfully increasing the existing wing strength to near zero, but calculated development work and a building block approach allowed for design updates to be implemented with an adequate amount of confidence in the new design along the way. Full component static proof load testing of the rebuilt DarkAero 1 wing eventually verified the redesigned structure for a larger high-speed gust encounter operating envelope in both positive and negative lift load conditions. The stiffness increase of the entire wing assembly — how much the wingtips deflect under applied load — was exciting to record in real time. Although not a previous concern, the wing tip deflection per g was decreased by more than 25%.

GG: According to Stube, the finalized pi joint assembly did add a couple more pounds to the wing structure, but the increase it achieved in structural margin for gust loads was well worth it. The whole team was really excited that the pi joint redesign worked. “It seemed like this was an engineering problem that might not have a clear answer; there were so many conflicting requirements and tight constraints. We went from a butt joint to a pi joint assembly in a way that was also proving out the manufacturing, including adhesive application, bondline thickness and porosity, cure and just access for installation. We solved all of this AND it worked the first time.” And yet, the team is already developing the next iteration for when the DarkAero 1 actually enters production.

The modified DarkAero 1 center wing box structure dry fit could be performed outside of the wing structure. The curvature of the lower wing skin can be seen toward the ends of the lower pi joints. 

RS: The exact multi-pi joint design used for the prototype wing is not directly reflective of intended future production configurations, as the retrofit drove non-ideal design trade-offs for efficient fabrication. During production, where the structure can be manufactured with all assembly steps in mind from the start, the exact manufacturing techniques and joint geometry can be better optimized for reliability in higher volumes. For example, the pi joint geometry could be directly molded and co-cured with the lower wing skin laminate. Hybrid pi joint and shear web-like features could also be combined to eliminate secondary bonding steps, and the center wing box structure could be further blended into the neighboring geometry. Although the pi joints did show higher residual strength after initial damage occurred, further increase in the joint’s damage tolerance could be achieved through laminate stitching or tufting, z-pinning or even pi joint-shaped 3D woven fabrics.

Whatever the engineering or manufacturing application may be, the DarkAero team tries not to get too reliant on any one specific process or material and continually refers back to the project requirements to drive design and manufacturing solutions. Sometimes, building physical hardware to get actual test data can be quicker and more accurate than computational analysis and this center spar modification was an interesting engineering problem to solve in this way.

GG: DarkAero is trying to provide innovative composite solutions in a more affordable way. “Most companies have used much more expensive methods to make pi joints that also required a long internal approval process,” says Stube. “We simply need to move faster with a tighter budget.”

So, stay tuned — CW will publish a future article on DarkAero’s novel approach for producing composite pi joints.

About the Author

 

Ryan Stube

Ryan Stube is the chief engineer at DarkAero Inc., returning to the company after being the first intern in 2019. He is currently leading the development program of the DarkAero 1 focusing on bringing the clean sheet designed prototype aircraft safely into flight testing. His previous aerospace experience includes leading Merlin rocket engine refurbishment at SpaceX, with specialization in thermal protection systems, turbopumps and engine testing. ryan.stube@darkaero.com

On 14 April 2026, Vertical became the second company globally to complete a two-way piloted transition flight in a full-scale tiltrotor eVTOL and the first to do so under civil aviation Design Organisation Approval regulatory oversight. Source | Vertical Aerospace

Vertical Aerospace (London, U.K.) announced that on April 14, it successfully completed a two-way piloted transition flight of its full-scale tiltrotor electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicle. According to Vertical, it is the second company globally to complete this flight milestone, and the first to do so under civil aviation Design Organisation Approval regulatory oversight.

Vertical’s VX4 prototype aircraft is reportedly manufactured with composite materials across its entire structure, supplied by a long-term supplier partnership with Syensqo (Brussels, Belgium). The airframe will be manufactured by Aciturri Aerostructures (Mirando de Ebro, Spain). The battery packs are produced at a Vertical Energy Centre (VEC) in Bristol, U.K., which Vertical reports has been upgraded into a pilot production line with automated aerospace-grade manufacturing processes to support certification and production.

On April 14, Chief Test Pilot Simon Davies completed the flight — transitioning from vertical take-off to wingborne cruise and back to vertical landing — all in one continuous flight. This builds on Vertical’s thrustborne transition on April 2 and marks the completion of two-way transition. According to Vertical, this capability for transition flight validates the technology which will enable its commercial aircraft Valo to take off vertically from a city center vertiport or rooftop with passengers, fly efficiently at speed like an airplane, and land vertically at its destination comfortably, quietly and without a runway. Planned real-world routes include Canary Wharf to Heathrow or JFK to Manhattan.

As with all Vertical flight tests since 2023, this milestone was achieved under the direct oversight of the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), who are working in close collaboration  with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) toward Type Certification of Valo. Testing is conducted under Vertical’s Design Organisation Approval, a pre-requisite for  entry into service. 

With all phases of flight now proven — vertical take-off, wingborne flight and transition between the two — Vertical is moving into the next stage of certification testing. This will include critical design review, when the aircraft design is locked, followed by the build of seven pre-production Valo aircraft in the U.K. for compliance and verification testing with  the CAA and EASA. 

Vertical is targeting certification of Valo in 2028, with entry into service expected shortly thereafter. The certification approach is designed to be transferable to other regulators, including the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Brazil’s National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC) and the Japan Civil Aviation Bureau (JCAB), supporting global deployment with airline and operating  partners including American Airlines, Avolon, Bristow, GOL and Japan Airlines. 

Over the next 12 months and beyond, Vertical says it will execute public flight demonstrations including at Farnborough International Airshow in July, progression of the hybrid-electric demonstrator, expansion of the Vertical Energy Center, advancement of the manufacturing facility, and production of the first full-scale Valo certification aircraft. 

Further, Vertical expects its U.K.-based manufacturing and supply chain to support thousands  of high-skilled jobs and significant export growth, with its ecosystem projected to  grow to over 2,000 jobs by 2035. 

“This is now the most significant technical milestone in our history,” says Stuart Simpson, CEO of Vertical Aerospace. “Full piloted transition is the most critical and complex challenge in eVTOL development, and we’ve achieved it under more rigorous regulatory oversight than anyone in the category. Our focus now is on executing our roadmap and bringing certified electric flight into commercial service.” 

“Through our Industrial Strategy and the Aerospace Technology Institute we’re backing companies like Vertical who are demonstrating the kind of innovation, engineering excellence and export potential that can keep Britain at the forefront of the global aerospace industry, and create high-skilled jobs for local people,” says Peter Kyle, U.K. Secretary of State for Business and Trade.

Walter has introduced the TC620 Supreme thread milling cutter, which has a multi-row design that exerts low cutting forces, reduces deflection and enables optimal dimensional accuracy. The tool is well suited for producing J-thread profiles, which are intended for aerospace and other applications in which threaded components experience high-temperature and high stress levels.

J-threads feature a root radius that improves the tensile strength of the connection by reducing the stress concentration factor in the thread, making the thread more reliable. The usable length of the tool is up to 2.5 × DN in the standard program.

The primary application is threading stainless steel and heat-resistant super alloys with a hardness up to 48 HRC (ISO material groups M and S), and the secondary application is cutting steel, cast iron and non-ferrous metals also up to 48 HRC (ISO material groups P, K and N). The tool is suitable for difficult applications such as threading Inconel 718 and ones that require a high level of process reliability.

The thread mill is made of the high-performance grade WB10RA carbide for thread milling nickel-base and titanium alloys. The tool features internal coolant for reliable chip removal even when machining at a high feed per tooth. The cutter is said to provide low costs per thread due to long tool life capabilities and short machining times. In addition, the company says it enables high process reliability and easy handling as radius corrections are rare.