How to Become an Approved Supplier to Aerospace Companies

What does becoming an aerospace supplier really involve?

You become a supplier to aerospace companies in three moves. First, you match one specific need a buyer already has. Second, you reach the handful of people inside the plant who sign off on a new source. Third, you pass their supplier approval. A registration form records that you exist. Nobody approves you because of it.

The buyers in US civil aerospace fall into four groups. Airframers build the aircraft. Engine makers build what powers them. Tier 1 suppliers build complete systems for both, such as landing gear, interiors, avionics or nacelles, and they buy heavily from tier 2 and tier 3 shops underneath them. MRO shops maintain, repair and overhaul the aircraft that are already flying.

The International Trade Administration's aerospace industry page counts repair and overhaul work, composites, metal parts, avionics, test equipment and coatings among the links in the US aerospace supply chain.

A new supplier usually sells something narrow into that chain. It might be machined parts, composite parts or a special process such as coating or heat treatment. It might also be tooling, testing, or software that runs a shop floor or a repair line.

So your first target is usually a plant or a repair station where your part family is actually made or fixed, because that is where somebody feels the gap you fill.

If you cannot name the buyer role you are writing to, the part family you want and the proof you will show, you are not ready to prospect yet.

That proof starts with your own customers. On the first call with a client I ask who has paid them in the past year, how much, and whose signature was on the order.

For a supplier with a few large customers, the answers are short, and that is useful. They tell you which kind of plant, which title and which part family to start from. My order for choosing the market before the first email works the same way here.

Who decides whether a new supplier gets approved?

A small group of people approves a new aerospace supplier, and they rarely sit in the same department. This is the decision map I would draw for a tier 1 plant. The roles shift a little from company to company, but the jobs stay the same.

Read the table as a chain. The commodity buyer usually opens the door, because a gap in their spend is the reason anyone talks to you. Supplier quality decides whether you can be added. Engineering decides whether you can make the part. At an MRO shop the chain is shorter, and purchasing plus the repair station manager often carry most of it.

A supplier portal stores your capability data so someone can search it. It does not read your proof, sit through an audit or argue for you in a sourcing meeting. A person does those things, and you want to know that person's title before you send anything.

Write every first message so it still makes sense when it is forwarded to another department. One line for the buyer about lead time, one line that supplier quality would care about, and one concrete part example for engineering.

Before my team builds a list, we go back through a client's closed deals and find who really made the decision in each one. Those titles become the filter, because every niche has its own decision-makers and a generic title wastes the send.

I also strip out vague titles such as Assistant, Associate or a bare Manager with no function in front of it.

If you already sell to one aerospace or industrial customer, ask them two questions: who found you, and who approved you. Then look for plants with the same structure, the same materials and the same kind of parts. That lookalike list is the start of a lead list worth sending to.

What do aerospace buyers actually check before they approve you?

Aerospace buyers audit new suppliers hard for a legal reason. A company that holds or applies for an FAA production certificate must put its quality system in writing.

Under 14 CFR 21.137, that system must include supplier control. That means procedures making sure every product, article or service a supplier provides conforms to the holder's requirements. It also means a process for suppliers to report nonconformances found after the product has left them.

The same section requires planned internal audits, quality records kept for at least 5 years, or 10 for critical components, and controlled procedures for selecting, training and removing the people who sign authorized release documents.

The wider Subpart G rules add that the holder must give the FAA a quality manual in English. The FAA may inspect the quality system, facilities, technical data and products, and may witness tests, including at a supplier's facility. The holder must also tell the FAA about any authority it has delegated to suppliers. This is not legal advice.

The FAA's production approvals page names three types of production approval:

• A production certificate, for making duplicate products to an FAA-approved type design
• Parts Manufacturer Approval (PMA), which covers both the design and the production of replacement and modification parts
• Technical Standard Order Authorization (TSOA), also a design and production approval, for an article that conforms to a Technical Standard Order

If you supply a production certificate holder, your work becomes part of that holder's supplier control, whatever approvals you hold yourself. Your parts and your paperwork end up inside someone else's FAA trail. Repair stations answer to a separate part of the FAA rules (Part 145), so ask an MRO buyer for its own supplier requirements instead of assuming the production rules above apply.

A supplier quality engineer who approves a weak supplier owns that risk, which is why a new approval takes time.

Three layers get mixed up in this process, and it helps to keep them apart.

The common mistake is to jump from the third layer straight to a purchase order. A supplier quality team parks anything that looks uncontrolled.

Where do new suppliers fit in the aerospace supply chain?

New suppliers usually get the first yes at a tier 1 plant, a tier 2 shop or an MRO site, not at the head office of an airframer. Head office sets sourcing policy. The plant feels the late part.

Start where your part family, the approvals you already hold and your delivery record are easiest to prove. If your best evidence comes from industrial hydraulics, a tier 1 plant building hydraulic systems will read it faster than an airframer will.

A plant is also a better address for a simpler reason. It has a person whose week gets worse when a part is late, and that person has a title you can find on LinkedIn. A corporate homepage has a contact form.

Do you need quality certification to sell into aerospace?

In practice, yes. The entry ticket is a quality system your buyer recognizes and can audit, plus evidence of controlled production, traceability and delivery. Exactly which certificate a buyer expects is written in its own supplier requirements, so ask for that document in the first real conversation instead of guessing. Ask directly which quality system certificate they expect and, for special processes such as heat treating or chemical processing, whether they require Nadcap accreditation.

Buyers want evidence because, as the section above shows, their own approval depends on controlling you. Frame your proof around what a supplier quality engineer would check first:

1. Approvals and certificates you actually hold today, with the scope written out
2. Part families you make now, with materials and the tightest tolerance you hold routinely
3. On-time delivery, as a number with a period such as the last 12 months
4. How you handle a nonconformance, from detection to the report your customer receives
5. What the site can do: machines, process lines, inspection equipment, shifts

Long before any formal supplier audit, buyers look you up online. Put the proof where they can see it before anyone asks.

Never claim what an audit will disprove. Do not list a certificate you are still working toward as held. Do not write "aerospace ready" if you cannot pull lot records in minutes. A buyer who catches one stretched claim slows the whole file down, or quietly stops replying.

How should you approach aerospace buyers without wasting the first touch?

The first message sells a short conversation, never your whole capability.

My team writes first messages to earn a meeting and leaves the service pitch for later. The call costs you nothing. It costs a supplier quality manager time they could spend on a supplier who is already late, so the message has to say why 15 minutes are worth it.

Proof belongs in the body of the message, where the reader sees it without clicking a brochure link. We put the client's past customers, results and examples into the copy itself. For a supplier, that means approvals held, the part family, the delivery number and one line on traceability.

A made-up example for a machining shop writing to a supplier development engineer at a tier 1 plant:

Hi Dana, we machine titanium and aluminum brackets and fittings for two tier 2 structures shops. Every lot ships with full material traceability, and our on-time delivery over the last 12 months was 98%. If any part family at your plant is running behind on lead time, I would like 15 minutes to see whether we fit your supplier requirements. Would next Tuesday or Wednesday work?

It runs under 70 words. It names the part family, the evidence and the reason for the call. It also survives being forwarded to supplier quality.

The sequence matters as much as the copy. We open with a LinkedIn connection and follow with email that continues the same thread, so your name is already familiar when the email lands. One or two messages are never enough. We plan a minimum of 5 or 6 touches across both channels.

The reply tends to arrive around the third follow-up, provided real time has passed between messages. Here is the follow-up sequence I run across LinkedIn and email.

Before any email goes out, the boring part has to be done: separate sending domains, authenticated and warmed-up inboxes, verified addresses. The details sit in setup notes for sending domains, inboxes and warm-up.

If your list includes sites in Germany, Austria or the Czech Republic, my team does not send cold email there without a compliant basis, so those sites get LinkedIn only.

Why do capacity gaps create openings for new suppliers?

Demand for capable suppliers makes the slow approval worth it. The ITA page cited above calls US-based suppliers "highly sought-after partners for aerospace manufacturing programs at home and abroad."

When an aircraft program raises its build rate, every part family on it has to rise too, and each family is made in somebody's plant. Those plants run out of machine hours, people or process capacity at different speeds.

Where one family depends on a single source that is falling behind, the buyer has a lead-time problem and an approval problem at once. That gap, in one part family at one plant, is the opening for a new supplier.

So the message is never "we would love to work in aerospace." It is "we can take lead time off this part family, and here is the evidence."

Start before the buyer is desperate. Approval takes months, so a shop that is already in a conversation, with its file half reviewed, is the one that gets the call when a source fails. A shop that shows up the same week as the crisis starts at zero.

In some industries decisions simply move slowly, and I plan campaigns around that instead of fighting it. Aerospace is one of those markets.

The market also looks small next to typical outbound lists, and that changes the method. If a market holds about 2,000 target companies and intent signals show up on maybe 10 of them, I skip intent data and write an offer the whole market can use.

Volume still matters, because you need quantity and quality together, and every extra right person reached is another chance to win. A few dozen perfect-fit names a month is a coin toss against busy calendars and bad timing.

In a small market the quantity comes from depth. When the list cannot get wider, it gets deeper: several approvers per account, a longer sequence, and often a second geography. For a supplier, that means four or five roles at each site, and every site of each tier 1, instead of one email to one company.

What should your first 30 days of supplier outreach look like?

Month one is measured in conversations. Contracts come later. I set the target in conversations started, because calls come out of conversations and contracts come out of calls.

Week 1: choose and collect. Pick one segment and one part family. Gather the five proof items from the certification section into one page you can quote from.

Week 2: build the list. List the sites that build or repair things that use your part family. Add the titles from the decision map at each site. Use the real titles aerospace plants give their approvers, never a generic manager search. Verify every address before anything is sent.

Week 3: write and set up. Write one proof-led message per role and a sequence of at least 5 or 6 touches. Set up the sending side.

Week 4: start. Send, answer every reply the same day, and log every referral to supplier quality or another department as progress.

Before you send anything in week 4, tick every box below.

• Segment chosen: tier 1, tier 2 or MRO
• One part family chosen, with materials and tolerances written down
• Proof page ready, with a delivery number and a period
• Decision-maker titles identified for each target site
• Follow-up plan in place: touches, channels and spacing
• Someone on your team with time to take the calls when they come

A supplier quality manager who agrees to talk and then waits days for your side to confirm will not ask twice.

Good progress in month one looks like this: replies from the right titles, a buyer forwarding you to supplier quality, a request for your capability details, or someone sending their supplier requirements. Signed contracts in month one are rare in a market this slow, and judging the effort on them would make you cancel something that is working.

You can run this plan in-house. If you hand the outreach to an agency instead, here is how that looks on our side.

With us, a campaign typically launches about 15 days after the contract is signed, and replies and booked calls can come inside the first 30 days after launch.

B2B sales cycles often run 6, 9 or 12 months, so deals from those early calls may close 4 or more months later, and you should know that before judging month one.

The calls that go nowhere still count. A buyer who says "not this year" knows your name, your parts and your proof, and the follow-up months later is often worth more than the first reply.

Working out which plant or repair station should hear about your part family first? I am happy to talk it through, so book a call and bring your shortlist.