Come fly with me: Asset tracking in aerospace

Track & Talk is Sensolus’s video and podcast channel exploring how IoT makes assets visible; from a small box to a giant container, indoors and outdoors. In this episode, Pieterjan sits down with Kristoff to talk about asset tracking in aerospace: the challenges, the trends, and a 10-year partnership with Airbus.

A $900B market, a 10-year backlog, and a supply chain under pressure.

The aerospace market today is valued at $800 to $900 billion globally and projected to grow to $1.5 trillion by 2032. There is already a backlog of 17,000 to 18,000 aircraft, spread across an order book of 10 years. Every airplane has approximately 1 million parts. That means an enormous, complex supply chain with components coming from different materials, different countries, and facing lead times of up to two or even three years on single components.

On top of that, aerospace is ramping up production capacity, which takes time, investment, and highly skilled people who are hard to find and even harder to keep. When everything comes together: boxes, parts, components; they all have to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right specifications and regulations, to be assembled into something that transports people and goods across the world for decades.

Visibility, traceability, and the data layer that makes AI work.

The first and most obvious value is visibility. Parts get misplaced. Suppliers are spread across multiple countries and transport modes. Customs, cycling times, sub-processing steps; every little hiccup in the chain has an outsized impact on the whole.

Highly skilled labor is scarce. Engineers looking for parts is a waste of resources. Technology reduces search time and lets people focus on what they were trained to do.

Traceability is non-negotiable in aerospace. Every tool used, every part used, every person near an assembly needs to be tracked. IoT automates those logbooks and makes compliance data always available; a significant driver of efficiency as production volumes ramp up.

And then there is AI. If you have the perfect dataset and put AI tools on top, it tells you where to optimize, what to change, what’s coming. What’s missing in most supply chains is reliable data. Wrong data leads to wrong insight and wrong decisions. This is where visibility and reliability become the foundation for everything else.

How Sensolus started with one clear challenge and kept expanding.

Sensolus has been working with Airbus for more than 10 years; one of the longest IoT partnerships in the aerospace industry. It started with one very clear problem: high-value assets spread across different countries, different subcontractors, different transport modes, and no visibility over where they were. People on the ground, dealing with labor shortages, needing to know where those assets were. That was the starting point.

The product was built with an aerospace engineering mindset from the foundation: reliability, security, no infrastructure required, long battery life, works over the top. These product features weren’t chosen in a boardroom, but came directly from the field. You cannot ask an aerospace company to stop building airplanes to install infrastructure. So the solution had to work without it.

Step by step, with a champion team that validated and tested, the partnership grew. From one use case to tool tracking, to in-flight tracking projects, to regulated zones like painting areas. From one product to 1 million connected assets. Not all in aerospace, not all at Airbus, but the trust built there became the foundation for everything that followed.