With this fourth edition, our Testia newsletter officially turns one! Over the past year, our goal has been simple: to tackle the most pressing topics in aerospace inspection and unpack where the industry is heading next. For this anniversary issue, we are diving straight into one of its most transformative technologies: additive manufacturing.
There is a hypothesis worth sitting with: additive manufacturing has not hit a technology ceiling — it has hit a process ceiling. And no amount of incremental improvement is going to break through it.
I say this as someone who came to Non-Destructive Testing relatively recently, from a technology and systems background rather than a lifetime behind a computed tomography (CT) scanner. That outsider’s vantage point has its advantages. My earlier experience was in designing and industrializing boards for radar and satellite communication, where hours spent inside clean rooms meant welcome relief on hot days, especially at production sites in subtropical climates. So when I walked into a CT room for the first time, one September morning, the sensation was almost a synesthesia: the same tightly controlled temperature and humidity, there to guarantee process uniformity — but this time wrapped in complete darkness, broken only by the glow of computer screens. That darkness changes everything. When I sit with our inspection technicians, I watch them spend hours in darkened rooms, scanning volumetric data slice by slice, carrying the full weight of a safety-critical judgment call on their shoulders — a weight they seem to shrug off effortlessly every time a newcomer walks in asking questions, even the obvious ones. When I sit with program managers and design engineers, I hear a different frustration: a technology — Additive Manufacturing (AM) — that promises to rewrite the rules of manufacturing across industries, still bottlenecked by a verification process that can cost as much as the part itself.
Two symptoms. One diagnosis: we are approaching the asymptote of what incremental improvement can deliver. And it is worth remembering what “incremental” actually means here. Unlike software that releases new versions every quarter, CT inspection depends on hardware — machines that represent significant capital investment, replaced or upgraded on a timescale measured in years, not sprints. You cannot out-optimize a bottleneck like that by tuning the same process a little harder each cycle. At some point, tuning stops being the answer.
So what is?
If tuning hardware has reached its limits, the breakthrough must come from how we transform the inspection process itself. And that is where software-driven process automation enters the picture. My conviction is that automation is no longer a competitive advantage. It is the baseline condition for staying at the frontier at all. We have spent years talking about “continuous improvement” as the north star for quality processes. I think that framing has quietly become obsolete. Continuous improvement optimizes what already exists. What we need now is a different operating model altogether — one where the human expert is amplified rather than consumed by the volume of data, and where inspection stops being a downstream gate and starts being part of how quality gets built in the first place. This is true whether you are inspecting a turbine bracket or a wind turbine blade, a bridge cable or a surgical implant. Any sector wrestling with additive, composite, or otherwise geometrically complex parts is going to hit this same wall.
This is exactly the shift the industry is working towards, one step at a time. The first step is about empowering the operator: giving inspection experts software that supports them during CT inspections by flagging what deserves a closer look. That way, their critical judgment is reserved for what really counts – not for scrolling through slice after slice. The second step looks further ahead, toward quality data flowing during production itself, not only after a part comes off the machine. Together, these incremental changes point to the same destination: certification not as a gate at the end, but as a thread running through the whole process, from powder to finished part.
This is not just about introducing a new tool here or there; it is a fundamental redefinition of what “inspection” even means. It is no longer a checkpoint at the end of the line, but a capability woven through the entire value chain — from raw material to finished, certified part – powered by technologies built to assist the inspector.
My advice to anyone watching this space — inside aerospace or well outside it — is this: do not ask “how do we inspect faster.” Ask “when will inspection even need to happen, three years from now, and are we building toward that, or just patching what we already have”. The organizations that will lead the next decade of quality assurance are not the ones perfecting today’s process. They are the ones already writing tomorrow’s.
In this edition of the Testia newsletter, we explore exactly what this shift looks like in practice. Across four distinct perspectives, our internal and external experts share their insights on how Additive Manufacturing and Non-Destructive Testing are intersecting today — and what might come next.
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Enjoy the read!
Alberto Ottolini
Head of Products & Equipment at Testia GmbH