Recent Aerospace Innovation Trends And Jet Zero

For those who read my recent article which discussed the value of the aerospace sector to the UK economy, you will know that there are certainly green shoots of recovery in the sector after the trials of the pandemic.

As a follow-up to that, I was interested to see what sort of impact the pandemic had on innovation in the aerospace sector. To this end, we ran some searches on data for published patent applications in the aerospace sector (specifically, on aeroplanes and helicopters) to build a picture of innovation levels. As patent applications are filed by companies to protect new and useful technological developments, they can give us an idea of innovation levels and R&D efforts for a particular sector. The patent office where the application has been filed assigns the application a specific code according to its technical area, and we can use them to see how many patent applications have been published in that field.