Britain’s aerospace supply chain took £2.6 billion of fresh work out of a single day at Farnborough this week, even as the headline value of the day’s deals fell by more than a third.
Day two of the Farnborough International Airshow generated £16.4 billion ($22.1 billion) of aircraft deals, according to trade association ADS. The day produced 82 firm aircraft orders, a 5 per cent increase on the second day of the previous show, alongside 12 aircraft options and 431 firm engine orders.
The total was still 34 per cent lower than the equivalent day at Farnborough 2024. More aeroplanes, less money.
The explanation matters for anyone selling into aerospace. Those 82 firm aircraft orders were worth £1.4 billion between them, covering Airbus, Boeing and Embraer types bought by AerCap, Philippine Airlines, Uganda Airlines, Shohin Airlines and Abra Group. Almost all the remaining value came from engines, with 431 firm orders covering CFM International, Pratt & Whitney and GE Aerospace products.
That is precisely where British content sits. Most of the aircraft ordered at Farnborough are assembled overseas, but their engines, wings, systems and structures draw on an international supply chain with substantial UK participation. ADS estimates £2.6 billion of day two’s firm business will flow to UK companies through those programmes.
Across the show’s first two days, ADS puts the running total at £58.9 billion ($79.3 billion) in commercial deals, worth around £10 billion ($13.5 billion) to UK aerospace. Day one alone accounted for £7.7 billion of that, on a bigger slice of a smaller global total.
For smaller suppliers, the composition of an order book is usually better intelligence than its size. Engine and maintenance work reaches further down the tiers than airframe assembly, and it lands as long-duration, repeatable business rather than one-off contracts. The £750 million financing framework UK Export Finance signed with GE Aerospace on Monday points the same way, steering five years of engine overhaul work through sites in Wales and Scotland.
A caveat on the arithmetic is warranted. ADS totals use list prices rather than the confidential discounts customers actually negotiate, and sterling figures were converted at £0.743 to the dollar. They measure industrial workload, not revenue.
The harder question is whether the work can be delivered. The sector is advertising 10,000 unfilled technical vacancies a year, a squeeze felt most acutely by the SMEs competing with the primes for the same machinists and engineers, minus the salary budgets. An order book stretching into the 2030s is only an asset if somebody is available to build against it.
Owners who want to get closer to that spending do have routes in. The Aerospace Technology Institute programme runs to 2035 with up to £2.3 billion of government research funding behind it, more than half the organisations it has backed to date are SMEs, and it operates a dedicated SME stream.
Three days of announcements remain, and the running total may well keep sliding against 2024. But the figure that determines whether British engineering firms feel any of this is not the headline billions. It is how much of each order carries a UK part number.
