As commercial airframers accelerate single-aisle production rates and the regional airline sector grapples with operating economics and fleet sustainability, component Tier-1 suppliers face dual demands: ramping up legacy output while engineering lighter, simpler architectures for future airframes.
For Eaton’s Aerospace Group, which now oversees 47 sites and delivers $4.2 billion in annual sales, addressing this balance involves substantial capital deployment across manufacturing infrastructure and additive engineering methods.
Matt Price, General Manager of Eaton’s Fuel Systems business, spoke to Aviation Business News at Farnborough Internal Airshow last month.
He said that the group’s recent $1.55 billion acquisition of Ultra PCS Limited has widened its footprint across military and civil programmes, adding key UK locations in Cheltenham, Weymouth, and Cambridge.
However, the core transformation in fluid and power management is currently taking place across its dedicated UK facilities on the south coast.
Consolidating infrastructure at Solent Airport
A central element of Eaton’s operational strategy is the relocation of its longstanding Titchfield fuel systems site. Having operated in its existing location for six decades, the business is transitioning fuel distribution design, development, and certification activities into a purpose-built, 176,000-square-foot facility at Faraday Business Park, situated on the Solent Airport Daedalus airfield in Fareham.
"That building will complete around the end of November, and we'll start to move into that facility," explains Price. "Titchfield is where we do all of our fuel distribution design and certification. We are one of Airbus’s largest fuel system suppliers and one of Boeing’s largest fuel system suppliers."
The site consolidation provides dedicated testing and integration environments for major commercial transport programmes, establishing an updated baseline for high-rate production as OEM backlogs expand.
Additive manufacturing and part consolidation
Alongside site investments, Eaton has established a European Centre of Additive Manufacturing at its Wimborne campus to transition metal 3D printing from low-volume prototyping into serial production.
For regional and low-cost carriers where component weight directly affects sector fuel burn, additive methods offer structural reductions by eliminating assembly joints and fasteners. Rather than replicating legacy subtractive designs, the approach requires a complete redesign of sub-tier fluid assemblies.
"Additive gives us a significant number of savings," Price notes. "Not just because it reduces the number of piece parts in an assembly because we can print more complex shapes, but it enables you to create shapes you couldn’t normally machine or cast. The whole design philosophy around additive is completely different, and it requires engineering to think about problem-solving in a very different way."
The practical benefits of this approach are already certified and flying on commercial Airbus programmes. By applying powder-bed additive processes to fuel hardware, Eaton has reduced complex components that historically required eight or nine discrete machined sub-parts into single- or two-piece integrated units.
For airline operators and line maintenance teams, the reduction in bill-of-materials complexity provides knock-on operational efficiencies. Fewer assembled joints minimise potential external leak paths and reduce maintenance tracking overhead, component maintenance manuals (CMMs), and rotable stock keeping units (SKUs) required across airline supply chains.
Evaluating the additive aftermarket timeline
While the manufacturing advantages for forward-fit production are established, Price remains pragmatic regarding how quickly additive components will alter line-replaceable unit (LRU) turnarounds across current third-party MRO networks.
Conventional component production relies heavily on long-lead raw forgings and subtractive milling from solid aluminium blocks ("hog-outs")—a process that generates substantial material swarf and scrap. While additive manufacturing mitigates raw material waste and avoids standard casting lead times, incorporating 3D-printed hardware into the operational aftermarket remains a multi-stage process.
"Longer term, as the adoption of additive manufacturing increases, it will be able to short-cycle some of the development times, certainly on castings," says Price. "If it's designed into the products to start with, it will be better and easier to provide support. But for now, I don't see it rapidly changing the aftermarket."
Propulsion transition: retrofits versus clean-sheet deployments
Looking ahead to next-generation decarbonisation and the development of alternative propulsion, Eaton is conducting UK government-backed research into advanced hydrogen fuel pumps. While zero-emission demonstrators and regional fuel-cell initiatives continue to attract industry capital, establishing commercial-scale fuel delivery systems for cryogenic or gaseous hydrogen remains in early development stages.
When assessing the broader transition to high-voltage architectures and alternative fuel delivery through the 2030s, Price highlights the distinct boundaries between fleet modification programmes and radical architecture shifts.
"We are focused quite heavily on retrofits and modifications, and we've done several of those with both military and civil customers in recent times," Price states. "Realistically, the only way you're going to prove out any radical technology is by deploying it on a clean-sheet aircraft. The adoption of anything significantly different to what's in the market today will require a new platform because of the supporting systems that go with it."
To align these sub-system architectures with future airframes, Eaton maintains regular engineering forums with main airframers, ensuring manufacturing capabilities at Wimborne and Fareham align directly with next-generation regional and single-aisle programmes.
