Building trust in flight-critical metal AM: Inside the SAE AMS AM standards committee

Standards rarely attract the attention given to new Additive Manufacturing machines, materials or applications, but in aerospace AM they are essential to progress. Reporting from the SAE AMS AM Metals Sub-Committee’s spring meeting at GKN Aerospace in Trollhättan, Sweden, Chair Dr Tyler LeBrun offers an inside view of the consensus work shaping flight-critical metal AM, from machine qualification and process control to in-situ monitoring, powder management, Nadcap accreditation and future inclusion in MMPDS.

In aerospace, Additive Manufacturing does not advance solely on machine capabilities. It advances when engineers, materials specialists, regulators, primes, suppliers and standards bodies agree on how a process is to be qualified, monitored, documented and trusted. Much of that work takes place out of sight. Behind every flight-critical metal AM component sits a chain of consensus-based specifications governing feedstock, machine qualification, process control, material properties and supplier accreditation. These documents rarely attract the attention given to new machines or headline applications, but they are among the essential foundations on which industrial adoption depends. From May 5-7, 2026, the SAE Aerospace Material Specifications Additive Manufacturing Metals Sub-Committee (SAE AMS AM-M) met at GKN Aerospace’s facility in Trollhättan, Sweden, to continue that work. The spring face-to-face meeting brought together engineers, materials scientists and standards professionals from across the aerospace industry to advance the development and revision of specifications that are helping define how metal Additive Manufacturing parts will be qualified, produced and accepted in flight-critical applications.

GKN Aerospace served as a gracious and technically engaged host, providing both logistical support and several of the meeting’s most substantive technical presentations. Participation spanned ten countries across Europe, North America, and Asia, a geographic spread that reflects the reach of the committee’s work. The specifications developed in these sessions are used by aerospace OEMs and their supply chains on multiple continents, and the voices that shape them are drawn from the same breadth of organisations that depend on them. The three-day programme opened with a welcome from GKN and moved immediately into plenary committee business, including a state-ofcommittee address, a presentation from the programme manager of the Metallic Materials Properties Development and Standardization (MMPDS) handbook, and a report from the Performance Review Institute (PRI) on the Nadcap aerospace accreditation programme. The meeting also featured a tour of GKN Aerospace’s manufacturing facilities, offering attendees a direct view of the industrial AM environment in which these standards are applied. State of the committee SAE AMS AM Committee Chair Dr Tyler LeBrun of The Barnes Global Advisors opened the technical sessions with an overview of the committee’s mission and current trajectory. The Trollhättan meeting was organised and chaired by Dr Chloe Johnson of Beehive Industries, Chair of the Metals Sub-Committee, whose stewardship of the three-day agenda kept a broad and technically dense programme on track. The SAE AMS AM committee operates as the primary consensus-based standards body for metal and nonmetal Additive Manufacturing in aerospace, representing over 220 organisations across 28 industry sectors. Its specifications form an interlocking hierarchy spanning feedstock, process control, machine qualification, and material properties, ensuring that a part produced to an AMS material specification carries an auditable chain of controls from raw powder or wire through finished product. The technical working sessions in Trollhättan were dedicated to advancing several specifications at various stages of development. The breadth of this portfolio reflects the maturation of the committee’s scope from its founding documents to an increasingly comprehensive body of standards. Qualifying AM machines for aerospace production AMS7032, Revision A: machine qualification The original release of AMS7032 established a foundational framework for operationally qualifying an AM machine to produce material in compliance with an aerospace material specification. Revision A, currently past its first partial ballot, represents a substantial update of that framework. The revision extends the document’s scope from Laser Beam Powder Bed Fusion (PBF-LB) systems to all fusion-based metal AM processes, including Directed Energy Deposition (DED) and Binder Jetting, reflecting the growing diversity of process technologies entering aerospace production. Revision A is a direct response to feedback accumulated from producers, machine OEMs, and contract manufacturers who have worked against the original document in practice. Their experience identified opportunities to qualify new machines more cost-effectively and efficiently, without compromising the technical rigour that makes an OQ meaningful. The revision translates that feedback into updated requirements, producing a framework better aligned with the realities of industrial AM qualification. This is the living document nature of the committee’s work in action: when industry engages with a published standard and identifies where it can be improved, the committee is prepared to incorporate that input and revise accordingly.

Read the full article at Metal AM Magazine, Page 147