Aerospace’s most rigorous supplier audit program spent 35 years perfecting its understanding of conventional manufacturing processes, and now applies the same scrutiny to additive manufacturing.
Our series on additive manufacturing in aerospace continues with Richard Freeman, Principal Staff Engineer at the Performance Review Institute (PRI), which administers the Nadcap program.
Freeman, who spent over a decade on the supplier side before joining PRI, now does works that includes time on the working group that originally wrote laser and electron beam PBF audit criteria inside the welding task group, work that eventually seeded the standalone AM task group. Speaking at the 2025 AMA: Aerospace, Space and Defense conference, Freeman laid out how far the program had come and where it was headed.
PRI conducted 6,140 audits in 2025 across 53 countries, using approximately 350 contracted auditors, accrediting around 4,600 suppliers across 26 critical process categories. Its 65 subscribers include virtually every major aerospace and defense OEM, with Honda Aero and Aveo Space the most recent additions.
Additive manufacturing is now one of those 26 categories, with the AM task group, chaired by Dave Abbott of GE Aerospace, responsible for developing, balloting, and ratifying the criteria auditors use.
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Why Additive Manufacturing Requires Upstream Audits
Unlike machined parts, the integrity of a PBF component cannot be fully confirmed by inspecting the finished part alone. An audit goes upstream, checking whether the process is controlled tightly enough to be trusted across personnel, equipment, and documentation. NADCAP was already doing this for heat treatment, chemical processing, and non-destructive testing. AM is next in that line.
NADCAP was formed in 1990 to solve a different but related problem. “The aerospace and defense companies around the world got together and said, we are auditing our supply base in a whole range of special process commodities, and they’re pretty much identical audits, give or take some very specific things that maybe Rolls-Royce, GE, Safran would ask,” Freeman said.
“So, how about we all get together collectively and develop audit criteria for special processes?” One audit, agreed on collectively, that satisfies every OEM on the subscriber list. The model is fundamentally the same.
What the criteria can and cannot require is something Freeman is precise about. “We NADCAP are not a specification writing body,” he said. “We take SAE, ISO, ASTM, AWS specs, look at all of the good that’s in those specifications, and draw compliance questions out of them. We cannot write a compliance question that is over and above an international specification requirement.”
For PBF, that means drawing on AMS 7003, 7007, and 7032, alongside ISO ASTM standards. The audit is a check on compliance with those specs, not a new layer of requirements invented by the program.
By 2025 the AM task group had two major publications: revised metallic PBF criteria, AC7131/1, published in April 2025 and effective from August 3; and directed energy deposition (DED) criteria, AC7131/2, published in June covering laser powder, laser wire, electron beam wire, and gas metal arc and plasma wire DED, with first audits beginning in Q4 2025. Several subscribers already mandate NADCAP AM accreditation to their supply chains; others are working through mandate programs with their supplier quality groups.
More Audit Criteria have been developed in 2025, with AC7131/3 on Laser powder bed fusion of non-metallic materials (sometimes known as Selective Laser Sintering) close to publication for audits in late 2026, after a successful test audit at a supplier in Belgium in March 2026. AC7131/4 on Fused Filament Fabrication (also known as Fused Deposition Modelling & Material Extrusion) has completed all technical ballots, and will be undergoing a test audit at a supplier in Germany in September 2026. Cold Spray AM is also being developed in AC7131/5 and is likely to be published in early 2027.
Every AM facility audit begins with a general checklist regardless of process. “We look at general company information, we check how a company takes a purchase order into their business, how they do a contract review, how they flow down requirements customer specific or otherwise right down into their internal procedures,” Freeman explained.
Powder purchasing and control, gas management, personnel qualification, and inspection protocols are all in scope. For PBF, the audit layers on equipment capability, software control, build interruption management, key process variables, and any subsequent thermal processing, including stress relief or hot isostatic pressing.
On unplanned interruptions, “say a grid power failure, you would likely scrap the part and start again,” Freeman said, though for R&D purposes some parts may be quarantined and sectioned to evaluate the effect. Each AM audit runs for three days and includes two job audits, both in-process. Suppliers need AS9100 before applying, and accreditation starts at 12 months, extending to 24 on merit.
By mid-2026, the program had completed well over 100 PBF audits, with accredited AM suppliers across North America, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Belgium, Switzerland, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and India.
The findings have been consistent enough to form a pattern. “We found some issues in how the supplier manages moisture and contamination control, Freeman said, with operator training, key process variable documentation, software control, and calibration plans also recurring, alongside non-compliant tensile test results in some cases.
Non-conformances beyond a threshold trigger a Mode B failure. PRI classifies them by severity: Type P for potential product impact, Type C for confirmed unserviceability, with suppliers given 21 days to respond with evidence that may downgrade a finding.
“If you can show, for example, that test pieces and tensile samples still meet customer requirements, the finding can be reduced to a minor one,” Freeman said. Systemic issues, however, stay classified as major regardless of impact mitigation.
Failed audits are rare: out of over 6,200 annually, the number is very small. All 26 sets of audit criteria are publicly accessible through PRI’s eAuditNet platform, which also carries a searchable, filterable Qualified Manufacturers List of every accredited supplier worldwide.
Powder Production and Non-Metallic Process Expansion
In 2025, the program also moved into powder production, with criteria for gas atomization and plasma route manufacturing going live after trial audits at Carpenter, Hoganas, Tekna, and APC in Quebec between 2023 and early 2025.
AM was not the only area of expansion. NADCAP absorbed a Counterfeit Mitigation Task Group covering electrical, electronic, and electromechanical products, with migration of voting members and audit criteria still ongoing at the time of the conference, and a cyber security of physical products group holding its first meeting in Pittsburgh in October 2025. A titanium supply chain integrity incident a few years prior has led to the Counterfeit Mitigation Task Group extending their reach through new Audit Criteria for fasteners and raw materials.
On the non-metallic side, “obviously there are more AM parts flying in non-metallic materials than there are metallic at the moment,” Freeman said, “mostly class C parts, interiors of aircraft and things of that nature, but nevertheless you know hundreds of thousands of non-metallic parts flying.” By mid-2025, selective laser sintering and fused filament fabrication criteria had both gone to ballot, with cold spray AM next in the queue.
Freeman also flagged a scaling risk that auditors are watching. PBF systems have gone from single and dual lasers in 2014 to 12-laser platforms today, with some Chinese manufacturers moving toward 36 or 64, introducing spatter and gas flow interaction risks that vendors have not fully resolved.
On the software side, AI is already generating audit response drafts from simulated NCRs at 80 to 85% usability. “Two years ago, it was junk. Now it’s scarily accurate,” he said. PRI is watching how that capability develops.
When an audience member raised the ASTM AMCOE certification program as a potential alternative, Freeman was direct. “The ASTM one uses more generic ISO ASTM specs because it is trying to cover a multitude of industries,” he said. “Ours is aerospace specific and theirs is a wide range of industries they’re trying to cover.” AMCOE is designed to serve automotive, medical, and power generation alongside aerospace; NADCAP references SAE, ISO ASTM, and AWS throughout.
No AM audits had yet taken place in Brazil or Argentina, despite NADCAP operating in both countries for other process categories. Freeman acknowledged the gap and said he expected it to close. “The more that grows, the more I would say yes, we’re becoming part of it,” he said.
NADCAP meets three times a year; Madrid in 2025 drew 700 attendees, Pittsburgh in October was expected to reach 1,200. Suppliers who attend two meetings become eligible for voting membership on audit criteria. The schedule runs in Singapore in October 2026, Anaheim in February 2027, and Paris in June 2027.
For suppliers weighing accreditation, Freeman kept it simple: “If you’re encouraged to get accredited by your customer or they mandate it, but certainly if they encourage you, I’d look at it.”
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