What AAM Developed — And What NGSA Will Scale

A follow-up to "AAM Is the Proving Ground. Next Generation Single Aisle (NGSA) Is the Game."

My last post argued that AAM has functioned less as a transportation revolution and more as an industrial proving ground — a place where technologies matured, suppliers sharpened capability, and engineering talent stayed active while the industry waited for what really matters: the next-generation single aisle aircraft. The question I was asked most afterwards was straightforward:

Which technologies, specifically? Most discussions focus on electrical flight - battery developments - and autonomy. Fair enough. But from an aerostructure’s perspective, the more important story may be manufacturing. Because the real bottleneck was never conceptual. It was industrial.

Out of Autoclave: The Manufacturing Constraint

An autoclave is essentially a large, pressurized oven. It produces excellent composite parts — slowly. Typical thermoset prepreg cure cycles run 6–10 hours including ramp-up and cool-down, require massive capital investment, and fundamentally do not scale gracefully toward automotive-style production rates. Global access remains constrained.

For decades, aerospace has talked about importing automotive manufacturing discipline. The reality is less romantic. Aerospace volumes are structurally lower - closer to high-end Porsche than everyday Volkswagen — while certification constraints make process changes slow, expensive, and risk-heavy.

You cannot simply transplant a Toyota Production System into an aerostructures plant. The qualification burden alone has no automotive equivalent. BUT, it is still the right approach to THINK more automobile in aviation.

Out-of-autoclave (OOA) manufacturing became the realistic path forward: thermoplastics, RTM, infusion, OOA prepregs — any process capable of achieving aerospace-grade consolidation without traditional autoclave cure.

Importantly, AAM did not invent these technologies.

Airbus’s Wing of Tomorrow, GKN’s G650 thermoplastic structures, TPRC development programs, Daher’s induction welding — all predate the SPAC era. The technical direction already existed.

What AAM changed was urgency.

Between 2020 and 2023, a dozen OEMs simultaneously projected production rates no existing aerostructures supply chain could realistically support. Every aircraft was composite-heavy. Almost none had meaningful autoclave access. Investor decks suddenly implied production volumes traditionally associated with automotive plants rather than aerospace programs. For the first time, and maybe only a brief moment in time, the manufacturing gap between aerospace and automotive stopped being theoretical.

Joby: The One Company Treating Manufacturing as Core Technology

Not all AAM companies approached manufacturing equally.

One stands apart. While most considered battery technology, propulsion systems, autonomy as core and more important than manufacturing the airframe, under JoeBen Bevirt, Joby consistently treated manufacturing capability itself as a strategic asset rather than something outsourced once certification arrived.

Where Archer leaned more heavily on conventional supply-chain structures — with Stellantis primarily acting as industrial advisor and manufacturing partner — and where Supernal struggled to establish a credible execution rhythm before its recent restructuring, Joby quietly built real in-house capability.

At Marina, California, Joby operates two Coriolis AFP machines producing major structural components including wing skins. Toyota engineers are embedded directly into production operations — not as consultants, but as part of the manufacturing system itself.

That distinction matters. The target is modest by automotive standards — roughly four aircraft per month by 2027 across Marina and the new Dayton Ohio facility — but industrially meaningful for aerospace.

On thermoplastics specifically, Joby is ahead of the field. GKN’s Chihuahua facility produces thermoplastic composite flight control surfaces for the aircraft under a genuine production contract, not a demonstration program. And, they are looking at other components, those that are needed more than once per plane, such as Doors or Propellers, as potential transition targets to thermoplastics.

This is the clearest line connecting AAM manufacturing investment to future NGSA capability.

Assembly Automation: Borrowing Automotive Discipline — Carefully

Aerospace’s structural disadvantage versus automotive has always been assembly labor intensity. The automotive partnerships inside AAM — Toyota with Joby, Stellantis with Archer, Hyundai with Supernal — introduced something the aerospace industry often talks about but rarely executes cleanly. DESING FOR MANUFACTURING.

Thinking Operations System first, a key principle Boeing claims that needs to be solved prior to the launch of a next generation aircraft.

Toyota’s role at Joby is particularly notable because it goes beyond advisory support. Engineers are embedded directly into production operations, influencing manufacturing flow, takt logic, quality systems, and assembly philosophy.

Robotic drilling, automated fastening, machine-vision inspection and digital work instructions are all highly transferable to NGSA production. But the limits matter too. Aerospace is not automotive. The volumes are lower, the qualification burden is far higher, and certification changes carry enormous cost.

Some OEMs misunderstood, saying “We can’t think Aerospace, we are a Tech Company producing high rates”. Well, they have learned their lesson, and that lesson was never to copy automotive manufacturing wholesale. The lesson was to import its discipline selectively.

Conclusion

The technology transfer from AAM to NGSA is not primarily about air taxis. It runs through manufacturing capability. Had the SPAC-era production forecasts materialized — thousands of aircraft annually across multiple OEMs — aerostructures manufacturing would have been forced into rapid industrial transformation. Autoclave-dependent production models would simply not have survived economically.

However, those rates never arrived. BUT the pressure they created was real.

Suppliers invented, some invested. Processes matured. Thermoplastic capability accelerated. AFP ecosystems expanded. Engineers developed production experience on clean-sheet composite aircraft programs at a pace traditional aerospace rarely allows.

And perhaps most importantly: the talent stayed active.

That dimension of AAM is still systematically underestimated. Some of the industry’s best aerostructures engineers spent the past decade working on advanced composite structures, automation, joining technologies, and scalable manufacturing concepts inside AAM programs. When those programs consolidate, pause, or disappear, the knowledge does not disappear with them - It migrates directly into NGSA.

In many ways, that may prove to be AAM’s most durable contribution to aerospace. NGSA will scale what AAM forced the industry to confront. And the qualification windows are opening now. The suppliers who use AAM to think and develop next-generation manufacturing capability will be in the room. The ones who didn’t are running out of runway.