Segment
Airframes and structures: what the aircraft is made of
A modern airliner is a carbon-fibre tube with metal where carbon fibre cannot go. This segment covers how those structures are made, who makes them, and why the forgings and castings underneath have repeatedly been the thing that stops aircraft being delivered.
In one sentence
Airframe structures are the load-bearing parts of an aircraft — fuselage, wings, empennage and the joints between them — built from carbon-fibre composite, aluminium alloy and titanium according to what each part has to survive.
The last generation of widebodies moved the primary structure from aluminium to carbon-fibre composite, which is roughly half the weight for the same strength and does not corrode or fatigue in the same way. That change let cabins be pressurised to a lower altitude and more humid air, which is a passenger-comfort improvement that came out of a materials decision.
Composite did not replace metal everywhere. Anywhere loads concentrate into a small area — landing gear, engine mounts, wing-to-body joints — still needs titanium or high-strength steel, because a composite laminate is excellent in tension along its fibres and poor at taking a bolt through it. So a modern airframe is a hybrid, and the interesting engineering is at the joints.
The structures are not built by the aircraft manufacturer alone. A tiered supplier system builds sections around the world and ships them to a final assembly line, which is efficient when it works and is why a single supplier's problem becomes an industry's problem when it does not.
How this breaks down
Split by material and by who in the supply chain actually makes the part.
- Composite materialsFibre, resin and sandwich core — a supply chain shared between aircraft, wind blades and pressure vessels.Definition page
- Composite airframesHow a fuselage barrel is built from tape and resin, and what it costs to inspect.Definition pageChokepoint
- Aerostructures tiersSections built on four continents and flown to one assembly line, and what happens when one tier stumbles.Definition pageChokepoint
- Titanium and forgingsWhere composite cannot go, and why a press with a four-year queue sets an industry's delivery rate.Breaks down into: Melt and mill products · Aerospace forging2 pages belowChokepoint
- Aluminium mill productsThick plate, extrusions and aluminium-lithium — the metal the composite widebodies were supposed to replace and the narrowbodies never left.Definition page
What this depends on
Technology dependencies are solved by engineering; supply dependencies are solved by building something, which takes years.
- Standard
Structural qualification and production approval
Every structure is approved against a specific design, material and process, and built under an approved production system; changing any of them means requalifying before the part may fly.
Type certification
What depends on this
Other pages in this map that name Airframes and structures as something they cannot do without.
Companies across Airframes and structures
Every company named on a step below this page, ordered by how many of those steps it appears at. Compiled from the pages themselves rather than written separately, so the two cannot disagree. Not a ranking and not a recommendation.
- AirbusParis2 steps
- LeonardoMilan2 steps
- Precision CastpartsPrivate2 steps
- ArconicPrivate1 step
24 more companies appear at a single step each; they are named on the pages for those steps.
How these pages are written
Each page explains one technology in plain language, states what it depends on, and names companies by what they supply at that step. Company roles are described qualitatively and deliberately carry no market shares, revenue figures or rankings — those change faster than an explainer can, and a stale number is worse than none. Ticker links point at company pages on this site and are provided for reference only.
Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a forecast. A company named on a page about a technology is not thereby a good investment, and the chokepoints described are structural facts about supply chains rather than predictions about prices. Technology moves; where a page describes something as unresolved or in development, that was true when it was written.