By Ann Roosevelt
The aerospace industry saw success in 2007, but it won’t remain robust without policies in place to sustain it, according to the Aerospace Industry Association (AIA).
The industry expects to reach some $199 billion in sales for 2007. About 40 percent of those sales are exported, resulting in about a $57 billion trade surplus, the largest industrial trade surplus the nation has, only surpassed by agriculture, said Clayton Jones, chairman, president and CEO of Rockwell Collins [COL], and the AIA Board of Governors chairman for 2008.
“Times are very good for the aerospace industry right now because of the creativity of our people building new products that are in high demand around the world,” Jones said at a Feb. 14 media roundtable.
However, those times might not continue “if we neglect major public policy issues that we know are always at hand,” he said.
AIA has put together a compendium of top issues to educate those running for elective office, issues that need to be addressed to maintain the industry’s vitality.
The top issue, he said, is national defense. While defense spending has been ramping up, “we as a country still are in much need of modernizing our defense forces and equipment,” Jones said.
AIA looks at the current defense spending of close to 4 percent GDP as a “floor,” to build upon.
The economy can accommodate such spending, he said.
Another top issue is access to space and maintaining the national heritage of leadership, he said. In about 2010, NASA plans to retire the space shuttles and the nation “will experience a gap in the ability to have human access to space. We want to strongly support the conditions that will not make that gap get any greater than it already is.”
The economy depends on space, from communications to weather to entertainment. Whether it’s research and development or exploration, it needs to be robustly supported, he said.
In civil aviation, which is booming around the world, “we face, I believe, an impending crisis in our ability to move aircraft and people around the world if we are not as attendant to the air transportation system as we are to the production of new aircraft that our customers need.”
A national commitment and adequate funding are required, he said.
AIA President and CEO Marion Blakey said the association does not endorse candidates, but the group wants to make sure those in the political arena are “looking very closely at the challenges that we see and are being very clear about their own positions on these things.”
AIA will be working not just the candidates and their staffs, but also with think tanks, the party platform committees, and other groups that help form the positions for the candidates.