How The AS9100 Certification Prevents Low-Quality & Unsafe Aerospace Products

This article will explain the significance of the AS9100 certification in aerospace quality management and how it helps to prevent defective or substandard quality products.

The aerospace industry is seemingly the most regulated industry where ensuring the quality and reliability of the airplanes, spaceships, and defense craft is necessary to make sure their users are safe. The AS9100 certification was introduced specifically for aerospace businesses that emphasizes the quality and safety aspects of aerospace products or parts. It is based on the general ISO 9001 quality certification but includes additional requirements for preventing counterfeit parts, ensuring consistency in products, and for regulatory compliance. Here, in this article, we explain the requirements to help you understand how achieving the AS9100 standard can prevent your aerospace business from compromising the quality and safety of the products.

4 Ways the AS9100 Certifications Help to Ensure Safe and Quality Aerospace Products

Manages Special Processes

Manufacturing of aircraft, spaceships, and defense craft is no doubt complex and needs special processes such as welding, heat treatment procedures, heavy parts assembling, application of coatings etc. The standard includes a requirement that focuses on managing these special processes. It underpins that the processes need to be monitored continuously and their subsequent output must be checked and verified. Sometimes, for more crucial special processes, you need to execute destructive testing practices to confirm whether the processes have been effective.

The requirement also makes the aerospace organization responsible to decide controls necessary to improve the special processes or control any errors. The controls are often regarding the key variables i.e., personnel qualifications, periodic process monitoring and machinery/equipment specification.

Identifies and Prevents Counterfeit Parts

Since there are much higher risks of product nonconformity in the application of aerospace or defense products, the AS9100 standard also puts emphasis on restricting counterfeit parts in one of its additional requirements. They are unauthorized, imitated, adjusted parts, or substitute for aerospace parts which are falsely represented as legitimate parts to the manufacturers. It needs the manufacturers to identify or detect counterfeit parts at the source of supply. Some effective ways to identify them are inspecting the packaging of parts, checking if the parts accompany conformity documents, and ensuring whether these documents match the criteria of buyers.

While the requirement states that manufacturers must be able to detect counterfeit parts and prevent them, it also enumerates that they should avoid such parts in the first place. They can be avoided while choosing the supplier or vendors. You need to check whether they are authorized to sell the part you need, whether they are certified with quality standards like ISO 9001 or AS9100, and whether you will be able to trace back the source of materials if anything goes wrong later.

Ensures Regulatory Compliance

The AS9100 standard also requires the aerospace businesses to implement a QMS (Quality Management System) that is capable of meeting compliance with regulations imposed by the government and the aerospace industry. Under the requirement, you need to show, with proper documentation, that you are considering necessary controls for the special processes and are meeting all regulations. Also, you need to provide evidence that your business applies the controls. The demonstration of the design and work instructions of your QMS enables you to prove that.

Controls the Broad Supply Chain

Lastly, the AS9100 standard helps to ensure safety and quality of your products by helping you to control the entire supply chain. One additional requirement clearly states the need to prevent counterfeit parts from getting into the supply chain again after they are identified and avoided in earlier phases of production. Thus, simply sending back the parts to the faulty suppliers or vendors is not enough. You need to thereafter check with them through effective channels and ensure that the instances of counterfeit parts are reported.

Clearly, the AS9100 certification helps aerospace businesses to take their quality commitment to a new level ensuring that every minute aspect of their supply chain and production is regulated with sufficient controls. In the globally integrated aerospace supply chain quality and safety assurance of products must be a multilateral commitment by manufacturers and suppliers and achieving AS9100 will help to demonstrate your business’s genuine commitment to quality and sustain its position in the supply chain.