The Quiet Reality of Obsolescence

One of the things you learn quickly in aviation is that obsolescence isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t kick down the door. It simply waits quietly and patiently until the day you pull a component off an aircraft and discover that company who knew how to manufacture it closed up shop back when years started with “19”. The part has done its job faithfully for 20 years, but its supply chain hasn’t kept up.

This is the predictable tension built into commercial aviation: aircraft are designed to fly for decades, while supply chains are designed to support whatever is being produced this quarter. That mismatch isn’t a procurement annoyance; it’s a structural reality. And like most structural realities in aerospace, you don’t solve it with hand-waving or heroic last-minute scrambling. You solve it by building a smarter system.

The Role of Polymer Additive Manufacturing

Polymer additive manufacturing fits that category. Not because it’s glamorous. Not because it promises to "revolutionize" anything overnight (companies in AM making those types of claims barely lasted long enough for a 737 to make it to its next maintenance C check). Polymer AM fits because it quietly eliminates the constraints that made these obsolescence moments so intractable in the first place. And many of these annoyance parts, frankly, are low criticality pieces of plastic that have no bearing on flight, but matter nonetheless to an airline working to satisfy customers. Much of the AM industry had glommed on to solving the hardest problems, the immediate opportunity to address a real pain point has been ignored.

When Additive Manufacturing Had to Grow Up

I’ve often described aviation as the place where additive manufacturing needed to grow up. It had to become predictable. It had to become qualifiable. It had to accept the reality that airlines don’t care about flash and hype. Boring is good in aviation, very good. Airlines care about aircraft availability, and getting the part they need, even if it’s a quantity of three $200 parts and is going on a seat that is old enough to have a driver’s license. When AM matured enough to meet that bar, that’s when it started solving real problems.

Moving Beyond Traditional Inventory

Obsolescence is one of those problems. For decades, the only real defense against discontinued parts was to buy more of them. That meant quantities large enough to fill a warehouse, which is invariably not where the part is needed, and always the wrong quantity, sometimes too many, sometimes too few. As aircraft platforms stretch into their third and fourth decade of service, the idea that you can buy your way out of obsolescence gets harder to sustain.

AM offers a fundamentally different way of thinking: parts don’t need to exist until the moment they’re needed. Instead of tracking down retired tooling or pleading for minimum order quantities that make no economic sense, maintenance teams can rely on controlled, repeatable polymer AM processes to produce the exact number of parts required, and produce them quickly and locally.

From Physical Parts to Digital Inventory

And that’s where AM’s real value shows up. Not in the printing itself, but in the shift from physical inventory to digital capability. Parts become files. Lead times compress from months to days. The supply chain stops being a historical artifact and becomes something closer to a living system that adapts to operational need.

Improving Legacy Components

There’s another key benefit, when you’re replacing a part anyway, you finally have the freedom to fix the things everyone always wished had been improved. Legacy designs were often shaped around the constraints of the manufacturing methods available at the time. If a bracket had a chronic fatigue point or an interior component required more fasteners than anyone liked, those decisions were rarely about engineering. They were process artifacts.

With AM, don’t listen to someone telling you those constraints all disappear, but they do change and that opens up opportunity. You can add reinforcement where it’s needed, integrate features that previously required assembly, or eliminate weight that served no purpose other than making a toolmaker’s life easier 30 years ago. These aren’t radical redesigns. I’ve shown off a lot of printed parts that are flat rectangles. These are disciplined refinements. They are the kind of improvements that make long-lived fleets more maintainable and more predictable without requiring any structural deviation from the aircraft’s certified configuration.

Certification Considerations

Yes, there are still certification issues to address with each replacement part, but this isn’t as scary as many seem to believe. The existing processes under EASA and FAA rules for minor changes, or supplemental type certificates when needed, are sufficient to leverage AM in the same way any new part would be introduced.

A Practical Path Forward – Roboze Role

None of this means obsolescence goes away. Aircraft will continue to outlive supplier ecosystems. Programs will continue to evolve. But the industry now has a practical, certifiable toolset to close the gap. Polymer additive manufacturing gives airlines a way to get the right part at the right time, without relying on the industrial archaeology that used to define this corner of aviation.

If it also means fewer moments where someone has to say, “We don’t make that part anymore.” That’s progress the whole ecosystem can appreciate.

This shift is clearly visible at Roboze, where high-performance polymer AM is moving from promise to practical application, helping industries like aerospace build more resilient and responsive supply chains.

Scott Sevcik

Global Vice President of Aerospace & Defence