Energy consumption is the top preoccupation for commercial and military plane manufacturers alike. With rocketing oil prices and public concerns about carbon footprints, even the US Air Force has started to use energy efficiency as a primary criterion in its future purchasing strategy. As well as driving intensive innovation for the likes of GE and Rolls-Royce in terms of the fuel efficiency of their engines, this has also focused the minds of airplane manufacturers and airlines alike on the weight of the planes, the seats and the controls. More that any other issue right now, doing whatever it takes to reduce fuel consumption in an environmentally efficient manner is the critical concern across the sector.

Alongside this issue, the other two major drivers of innovation in the sector are NASA and the Pentagon. With the US still leading in space exploration and satellite production, and US military spend outstripping the rest of the world put together, given the scale of the contracts available, what NASA and the Pentagon want to achieve is top of the priority list for many aerospace companies. Not just in the military arena but also in the commercial airlines market, technology development in areas such as virtual engineering, simulation and modelling, intelligent systems, advanced smart materials, safer airframes and more reliable guidance systems are all being driven by specifications defined by these two bodies.

Correspondingly it is no surprise that, from a competitive perspective, there is a significant role for the EU in supporting an independent aerospace sector. While Brazil, India and China all have varied commercial and military aerospace activities, in terms of scale only the likes of Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems and, most significantly, EADS have the ability to compete with the major US based firms. The European Space Agency and the governments of the UK, France and Germany in particular are all keen to have innovation active within the EU and so support a number of major programmes. That said, for the European aerospace companies, the US is still the primary market, the one that sets the agenda and so, politics not withstanding, is pivotal in innovation policy.