Keighley Labs Earns Nadcap Aerospace Reaccreditation
This achievement has helped increase sales more than 30 percent, with orders coming from China and the UAE, which becoming a global aerospace hub.
Posted: October 25, 2014
The Nadcap program is recognized as the world’s premier quality audit scheme for special processes in the aerospace and defense industry. With this level of accreditation, a company can effectively gain access to worldwide suppliers of the aerospace and defense industries.
More than half of approved organizations reported that Nadcap has helped to increase sales and gain new business, according to program administrators PRI.
That is certainly true of Yorkshire metallurgical specialist Keighley Laboratories (West Yorkshire, UK), whose Technical Services division was awarded world-class Nadcap accreditation for a Materials Testing Laboratory (MTL) last year, in the process achieving coveted Merit Status for a superior audit performance.
As a result of this achievement and a consequent uplift in its worldwide industry profile, the division recorded an increase in sales in excess of 30 percent, with orders coming from as far afield as China. It is also reporting new business from the United Arab Emirates, which is set to become a global aerospace hub, as well as from the length and breadth of the UK.
Established in 1990, the Nadcap initiative is a cooperative industry effort targeted at improving quality, while reducing costs, throughout the aerospace and defense industries.
Today’s membership includes over 45 industry ‘prime’ contractors, including Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier, Honeywell, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls Royce, and the global aerospace supply chain that produces components for the primes.
In 2012, Airbus announced it was using the program to oversee suppliers of Special Processes and Keighley Labs consequently reaffirmed its prized Airbus approval, after securing Nadcap accreditation.
One of the few Nadcap accredited MTL facilities in the UK, Keighley Labs has been successfully assessed for the evaluation of aerospace welds, micro and macro metallography, micro-indentation hardness procedures, mechanical test specimen preparations, and tensile, impact and bend testing.
This particularly confirms the company’s international status as a center of excellence for weld testing and inspection services, running alongside its UKAS certification to many commercial standards and specifications and Civil Aviation Authority Chapter A8-10 approval of its in-house weld specimen supervisors.
Preeminence in this safety-critical area has enabled Keighley Labs to win contracts from the Emirates, for verifying welding quality and procedures on test coupons submitted by the region’s aviation manufacturing industry, which produces aero plane parts for primes such as Boeing and Airbus.
It is also testing fabrications for the Chinese aerospace sector, which the Farnborough Aerospace Consortium recently hailed as ‘presenting huge, long-term opportunities for UK companies’.
Nadcap Merit Accreditation is additionally attracting attention from other industries, such as the nuclear supplier chain, which place similar emphasis upon safety and quality requirements.This has enabled Keighley Labs to win metal tensile testing contracts within the UK nuclear industry, along with an influx of work from other quality-minded sectors.
With MTL reaccreditation recently granted, following another extensive audit as part of the ongoing Nadcap certification process, Keighley Labs expects to win more export sales from weld testing and other laboratory procedures, as well as introducing further quality improvements to its own internal processes.
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