Post by BOB Search - THE Aerospace, Defense and Space Executive Search Firm

There are only about five companies in the world that make the transparencies (windows) on commercial aircraft. The windows you look through as a passenger at 35,000 feet come from a very short list of suppliers. That short list became a live issue a few weeks ago. One of those facilities, GKN's transparency systems plant in Garden Grove, had a serious incident - reports of a plant in crisis with a risk of explosion, since contained. I won't speculate on the cause or the timeline to recovery. What I'll point out is the exposure it reveals. When one plant makes a majority of parts for the industry and goes offline, every other qualified supplier is suddenly trying to fill the same surge in demand at the same time. There is no slack in a supply base that concentrated. A single point of failure becomes an industry point of failure. We saw this a few weeks ago with GKN, and we saw it last year with SPS Fasteners in Pennsylvania. It's happened before and it will happen again. This is the risk underneath all the growth right now. Build rates are climbing, backlogs are full, and a lot of critical components trace back to one or two sources. If you run a program that depends on a sole-source supplier, use this example to re-evaluate your supply chain, diversify it, and ensure you have multiple sources. Now is the time to know exactly where you're exposed. Not the week it goes dark.