Flight Critical? A Perspective on the Assessment of Raw Materials in the Aviation Industry

Kurzfassung

The aviation industry is characterised by a strong dependence on particular raw materials due to high-performance requirements and strict certification standards. These materials are essential to the development of both economically and environmentally efficient aircraft and therefore form the foundation of the aviation industry as a whole. However, the supply chains for many of these materials are highly concentrated and have repeatedly proven to be vulnerable to disruptions, meaning that such dependence poses a systemic risk. To help stakeholders identify and mitigate such risks, a wide range of criticality assessment methodologies and lists of so-called critical raw materials have been developed. Yet, these criticality assessments are not standardised, are rarely tailored to specific industries and have seen only very limited use in aviation. Therefore, we investigate how criticality assessment methodologies can be applied to the aviation industry. To do so, we first analyse existing criticality assessments and their underlying methodologies. In a second step, we apply a modified version of the GeoPolRisk methodology to both existing aircraft and a potential future design. The results of the application step show that a large share of the materials used in aircraft qualify as critical raw materials. Although the criticality of individual materials varies across models and generations, the overall level of criticality remains consistently high, including in future aircraft. These findings demonstrate that the existing methodologies can be applied to aviation-related use cases and yield meaningful results. Nevertheless, they require adaptation to the specific requirements of the aviation industry and its stakeholders. Based on these findings, we propose further investigations into an aviation-specific criticality assessment methodology.