aerospace
(128)
ATI makes the metal that takes the heat.
A jet engine is a demanding customer. ATI built its business around that fact, trading ordinary stainless steel for alloys and components that earn their keep under pressure.
Quaker Houghton makes the small things pay
A factory can lose money one coolant tank at a time. Quaker Houghton has built a business around finding the losses hiding in the fluid.
Kaiser Aluminum. The value is in the details.
A jet, a beverage can, a precision tube. Kaiser Aluminum makes the metal behind all three. Its $670 million return to packaging reveals what customers are really buying: consistency.
Lockheed Martin sells the long game
A fighter jet is the beginning of the relationship. The harder business is keeping an entire system ready, year after year.
Boeing’s future is built one bolt at a time.
Boeing can design an airplane that crosses an ocean. Its harder assignment is making sure every ordinary step on the factory floor happens exactly as it should.
RTX and the price of staying airborne
A tiny flaw in engine metal exposed the enormous promise behind RTX: selling a machine means standing behind it for years. Its aircraft systems and missile defenses run on the same demanding bargain.
Novelis wants the aluminum back.
The company behind the metal in cans, cars and aircraft has built a business around the return trip. Its $5 billion Alabama bet shows how expensive closing the loop can be.
PPG sells paint. The payoff is time.
A coating is a thin layer with a long job description. PPG’s bet is that better chemistry, paired with better tools, can save customers far more than the price of the paint.
Textron built an empire. Now comes the edit.
The company behind Cessna jets, Bell rotorcraft, and E-Z-GO golf cars grew by putting unlikely businesses together. Its next move is to pull some of them apart.
Teledyne makes the invisible useful
From the James Webb Space Telescope to a yellow robot beneath the waves, Teledyne sells a particular kind of advantage: knowing what the human eye cannot tell you.
Honeywell Aerospace and the price of a missing part
Its systems help aircraft fly, navigate and stay out of trouble. Now the newly independent supplier must solve a problem closer to the ground: getting every last part out the door.
Rockwell Collins made the cockpit make sense.
A radio maker from Iowa learned to put complicated machines in conversation. Its enduring lesson is about what to connect - and where to stop.
Northrop Grumman and the price of getting it right
A telescope that unfolds in space. A bomber built to slip past radar. Northrop Grumman sells machines whose smallest details can decide whether the whole thing works.
Hadrian makes the factory the product
A missile can wait on a single metal part. Hadrian is betting that the way to shorten that wait is to redesign the factory around software, then sell the capacity.
Castelion’s real weapon is the factory.
Blackbeard flies at hypersonic speed. Castelion’s bigger bet is that America can build enough of them to matter - and afford to keep building.
Accelerator Centre: Keep the equity. Change the plan.
Waterloo’s nonprofit accelerator helps technology founders turn promising inventions into businesses. Its useful trick is pairing advice with the money, sales practice and industry access needed to act on it.
Bordeaux Technowest: the shortest distance to a first customer
In Bordeaux, a startup can find a coach, a workshop and an introduction to Airbus. The interesting part is what happens after the introduction.
Innovate Calgary makes the expensive middle of invention cheaper
A rejected accelerator application, shared laboratories and philanthropy-backed investment reveal how Calgary helps research become a business. The useful lesson is where to spend before anyone knows whether an idea will sell.
Machina Labs builds a factory that can change its mind
A flying C-17 repair panel, a custom Toyota tailgate, and two robots with a taste for sheet metal. Machina Labs is testing what happens when a factory can make a new shape without buying a new die.
Agile Space Industries: Ten weeks to fire. Longer to fly.
A Colorado propulsion company turns metal powder into working thrusters in weeks. Its customer wins - and one lunar setback - reveal what speed can buy, and what it cannot.
Vermeer taught drones to frame a shot. Then to find their way.
A Hollywood drone business became a supplier of GPS-free navigation. The revealing part is how a tool for getting the picture right found a customer who needed to get the aircraft home.
Venus Aerospace wanted a faster plane. The engine found its own customers.
A rocket engine built for a shorter trip across the Pacific has become the main event. Venus Aerospace is turning rotating detonation into a propulsion business for defense and space.
Revolution Space gives small satellites room to move
A Boston company turned liquid salt into satellite propulsion. Now the business once called Accion Systems is taking its small-engine ambitions into larger space systems and a $19.98 million Air Force development contract.
CesiumAstro’s next frontier is the factory floor
Its radios can change their instructions in orbit. Now CesiumAstro is taking on a harder terrestrial problem: turning adaptable space hardware into a repeatable manufacturing business.
Foundry Lab puts the waiting room out of work
A backyard microwave experiment became a way to make real cast metal parts without waiting for hard tooling. Foundry Lab’s wager: the most useful thing to print is the mold.
Vericut finds the trouble before the metal does
A Mercedes F1 machining trial recovered 48 minutes from one component. Vericut’s larger proposition is to let manufacturers rehearse expensive decisions before the cutting starts.
Jiga wants your engineer to meet the machinist
A custom part can survive a thousand calculations and still be undone by one unanswered question. Jiga puts engineers and manufacturers in the same conversation, with software to keep the paperwork from taking over.
Flatirons Solutions makes the aircraft manual earn its keep
An aircraft manual has to survive revisions, local edits and a journey to the shop floor. Flatirons Solutions turns that paperwork into a connected maintenance workflow - and is now adding visual guidance to the job.
Sigma Design makes the parts between the breakthroughs
A running rig, 58 wiring harnesses, and a factory retrofit reveal what this Washington engineering firm sells: fewer gaps between an idea and a working product.
nLogic makes defense systems work together. Its employees own the company.
Missile defense depends on the unglamorous art of making complicated things cooperate. This Huntsville engineering company applies a second kind of integration to the people doing the work: shared ownership.