Certifying to AS9100 in the middle of a revision. Here's how to do it once.
Rev D has been the aerospace standard since 2016, and it's what your registrar will audit you against today. But its replacement is close: the IAQG is merging the American, European and Asian versions into a single international document called IA9100, aligned to the ISO 9001 edition that published last week. If you're starting certification now, you'll certify to Rev D and transition afterward — and the work is considerably cheaper if you build with what's coming already in mind.
Book a free 30-minute callThirty minutes to work out where your system stands, what certification would take, and which parts are worth building for the new revision now rather than twice.
What the IA9100 revision means for you
The standard has not published yet, so anyone giving you clause numbers is guessing. What the IAQG has communicated publicly is clear enough to plan around, and three points matter commercially.
The name change is confirmed. The foundation carries over.
IA9100 stands for International Aerospace, and it replaces the separate AS9100, EN 9100 and JISQ 9100 designations with one globally released document. The structural foundation comes from Rev D. This is a revision and a rebrand, not a new standard built from scratch.
Certify now to Rev D, transition later.
Until IA9100 publishes and registrars are accredited to audit against it, Rev D is what you certify to. Transition windows for this standard have historically run two to three years, and industry expectation is around three, putting the deadline near late 2029. Waiting to start is not the cheaper option — it just means bidding work you can't win in the meantime.
The aerospace clauses survive. The surrounding expectations tighten.
Product safety, configuration management and counterfeit parts prevention are hallmarks of this standard and are expected to remain. What the IAQG has signalled is modernization around them: supplier management, digital assurance, supply chain resilience, and human factors treated seriously in root cause analysis rather than as a box on a form.
Where AS9100 goes beyond ISO 9001
AS9100 contains ISO 9001 in full and adds aerospace requirements on top. Those additions are where certification is won or lost, because they are the clauses your auditor knows best and the ones a shop coming from commercial work has usually never had to evidence. The clause numbers below are Rev D.
- Operational risk management (8.1.1)
- ISO 9001 asks you to consider risks and opportunities at the level of the quality system. AS9100 requires a process for managing risk within operations — assigning responsibility, defining criteria, identifying and mitigating risks in the work itself, and accepting residual risk deliberately. An auditor will ask to see the process, then pick a job and ask what risks you identified on it.
- Configuration management (8.1.2)
- You must be able to show which configuration of a part you built, when it changed, and that every change was authorized and communicated. For a shop running revisions of customer prints, this is where traceability either holds or falls apart. Building to Rev C of a drawing when the customer has issued Rev D is one of the more expensive mistakes in this industry, and this clause exists to prevent it.
- Product safety (8.1.3)
- A requirement to plan and implement processes that ensure product safety throughout the lifecycle — which means identifying where your product could contribute to an unsafe condition and controlling it. Ethical behavior and product safety awareness also reach into the leadership and competence clauses. There is no ISO 9001 equivalent to any of this.
- Prevention of counterfeit parts (8.1.4)
- You must plan and implement processes to prevent counterfeit or suspect unapproved parts entering your product. In practice this means controlling your sources, favoring franchised distributors and original manufacturers, having a route for reporting suspect material, and being able to explain what you would do if you found some. This is a common finding in shops that buy hardware on the open market to hit a price.
- Critical items and key characteristics
- The standard requires you to identify critical items — those with significant effect on product realization or safety — and the key characteristics that control them, then apply the controls those items need. A drawing with a flagged characteristic and no corresponding control in your process is exactly the gap an auditor is looking for.
- Special process validation and production process verification (8.5.1)
- Processes whose output can't be verified by inspection — welding, heat treat, plating, non-destructive testing — have to be validated and the validation kept current, including the qualification of the people performing them. Separately, first article inspection has to demonstrate that your production process actually produces a conforming part, with the record to prove it, and be repeated when the process or design changes.
- Foreign object damage prevention
- You need a program appropriate to your product: housekeeping, tool and hardware accountability, control of consumables, and inspection points that would actually catch a missing item. Aerospace auditors take this seriously in a way that surprises shops coming from other industries, and it is visible on the floor within thirty seconds of an auditor walking in.
- Flow-down to your supply chain (8.4)
- Your obligations follow your purchase orders. Suppliers have to be told the applicable requirements, including the ones your customer imposed on you, and you are accountable for their conformity even when they hold the approval. Outside processing — heat treat, plating, testing, calibration — counts, and most shops send something out.
- Nonconforming product and disposition authority (8.7)
- Use-as-is and repair dispositions require customer authorization where the contract says so, and you cannot quietly decide that out-of-tolerance is acceptable. Records have to show the nonconformity, the disposition, who authorized it and any concession obtained. Scrap has to be rendered unusable, not left on a shelf where it can find its way back into a shipment.
- Performance measured on delivery as well as quality (9.1)
- On-time delivery performance is an explicit part of monitoring customer satisfaction, alongside product conformity. Your primes are already tracking your numbers, and the standard expects you to be tracking and acting on the same figures rather than hearing about them at a supplier review.
- Certification is audited and recorded differently
- AS9100 certification runs through the IAQG's oversight scheme, which means your registrar must be accredited for aerospace and your auditor specifically qualified for it. Your certificate is recorded in the OASIS database, where your customers can look it up. Audits emphasize performance and effectiveness, not just whether a procedure exists — an audit approach that catches out organizations whose ISO 9001 certificate was earned on paperwork alone.
Build the quality system first, then the aerospace layer
To be clear about something the market often muddles: AS9100 is a standalone certification and you do not need an ISO 9001 certificate first. No registrar will ask for one. But AS9100 contains ISO 9001 in its entirety, which means roughly three quarters of the work of building an AS9100 system is building a sound quality system, full stop.
That's why my material is structured in two parts. The implementation course builds the quality system itself, clause by clause, with the procedures and forms written out and a completed example of each. The aerospace add-on then covers what AS9100 requires that ISO 9001 doesn't: operational risk management, configuration management, product safety, counterfeit parts prevention, critical items and key characteristics, special process validation, first article inspection, FOD prevention, and the supply chain flow-down obligations.
Work through the first part and you have a system that would satisfy an ISO 9001 auditor. Add the second and you have one built for an aerospace registrar. Nothing from the first part gets thrown away — and because the course is written to the 2026 edition of ISO 9001, you are building on the foundation IA9100 will align to rather than on the one it's replacing.
Who you'd be working with
I'm Steve Kent. I've spent over forty years in quality management, most recently as a Quality Director, with roughly twenty of those years on ISO 9001 and its derivatives — AS9100 in aerospace and ISO 13485 in medical devices.
I've built quality systems from nothing and rebuilt ones that had quietly stopped working. I've prepared companies for registrar audits and I've sat on the other side of the table during them, which matters more than it sounds: knowing what an auditor is looking for is a different thing from knowing what the clause says.
Falcon Quality is a one-person practice by choice. There's no account manager and no junior consultant doing the work under my name. If you engage me, you get me.
I'll also tell you plainly when something sits outside what I do. I build quality systems and prepare organizations for audit. I am not a registrar, I don't issue certificates, and I'll say so when you need a specialist — an accredited auditor, or an engineering authority on a process — rather than pretending the work is mine to do.
More about how I work
How the work goes
Four stages. An aerospace build takes longer than an ISO 9001 build, mostly because of the evidence the aerospace clauses demand and because your registrar's aerospace-qualified auditors are in shorter supply than their general ones. Anyone quoting you a fixed duration before seeing your operation is guessing.
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Map what exists against what's required
A clause-by-clause review against Rev D, with the expected IA9100 changes noted so you build once rather than twice. This is also where scope exclusions get settled honestly.
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Build the system
Procedures, forms and records written for how your shop actually runs — including the aerospace-specific ones: configuration control, FAI, risk management, counterfeit parts, FOD, critical items.
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Run it and generate the evidence
Training, a full internal audit cycle, and a real management review. Aerospace auditors want to see the system operating and producing results, and performance data they can test.
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Audit readiness
Choosing an accredited registrar, mock audit, Stage 1 and Stage 2 preparation, OASIS registration, and support closing whatever findings come out.
What it costs to do this with help
The two courses together are the self-directed path. For aerospace work I'd advise adding consulting calls to them — more strongly than I would for ISO 9001 alone. The aerospace clauses are the ones where a course can only take you so far: which of your processes count as special processes and what their validation has to demonstrate, how your configuration control should work against your customers' revision practices, what your FAI package needs to contain for the parts you actually make, and where your risk process has to bite rather than document. Those answers depend on your product and your customers. The call is free either way.
Step one: the implementation course
Eight modules building the quality system clause by clause, written to the 2026 edition of ISO 9001, with every procedure and form already drafted and a completed example of each. This is the three quarters of AS9100 that is simply sound quality management.
See what's coveredStep two: the aerospace add-on
Everything AS9100 requires that ISO 9001 doesn't — operational risk management, configuration management, product safety, counterfeit parts prevention, critical items and key characteristics, special process validation, first article inspection, FOD prevention and supply chain flow-down — with the forms to support each.
Ask me about the add-onConsulting calls — recommended
One-to-one time on the decisions a course can't make for you: special process validation, configuration control, FAI packages, audit preparation. Blocks of five calls for $600 or ten for $1,000. Most people doing aerospace work want these alongside the courses.
How the calls workBefore any of that, the free gap analysis gives you a reading on the ISO 9001 foundation — the part both standards share. It won't cover configuration management, FAI or the other aerospace clauses, so treat it as a temperature check rather than an AS9100 audit. Start the assessment
Common questions
- Should we wait for IA9100 before starting?
- No. Until it publishes and registrars are accredited against it, Rev D is what you can certify to, and every month you wait is a month of aerospace work you can't bid. The sensible approach is to build now with the expected changes in view — which mostly means not cutting corners on the things IA9100 is tightening: supplier management, human factors in root cause analysis, and demonstrating a quality culture rather than asserting one.
- Will our Rev D certificate still be valid?
- Yes, through the transition period. Based on how previous revisions of this standard have been handled, expect two to three years from publication, with three the general industry expectation — putting the likely deadline near the end of 2029. Your registrar will confirm the actual dates once the IAQG publishes the transition rules, and I'd ask them rather than take anyone's projection as fact, mine included.
- Do we need ISO 9001 certification first?
- No. AS9100 is a standalone certification that contains ISO 9001 in full, so certifying to AS9100 covers both and no registrar will ask you for a separate ISO 9001 certificate as a prerequisite. Some companies do hold both, usually because they serve aerospace and commercial customers and want the ISO 9001 certificate visible to the commercial side.
- What does AS9100 certification cost?
- The registrar's fee is separate from anything I charge and runs higher than ISO 9001, because aerospace audits take more days and the auditors are specifically qualified. Get quotes from two or three registrars early, and confirm each one is accredited for aerospace — a certificate from a body without that accreditation will not be recognized by your primes and will not appear in OASIS.
- What is OASIS and do we have to be in it?
- OASIS is the IAQG's database of certified aerospace suppliers, and it's where your customers verify your certificate rather than asking you for a PDF. Your registrar enters you after certification. If you're not in it, expect procurement departments to treat you as uncertified regardless of what you tell them.
- We're a distributor, not a manufacturer. Is AS9100 right for us?
- Probably not — AS9120 is the standard written for stockists and distributors, with the pass-through traceability and counterfeit prevention requirements that fit that business. AS9110 covers maintenance, repair and overhaul. All three are being revised together on the same schedule. Tell me what you actually do and I'll tell you which one your customers are asking for.
- We already do all of this. Why is certification such a project?
- Because most aerospace suppliers genuinely do control configuration, run FAIs and keep foreign objects out of product — and can't prove it in the form an auditor needs. The work is usually less about changing how you operate than about making the evidence trail visible, then running the system long enough to have records. That's also why a shop with good practices and no documentation can move faster than its owner expects.
- Do you work remotely?
- Yes, and most of this work is remote regardless of location. I'm based in Danville, California, so on-site work is straightforward in the Bay Area and possible elsewhere. Some parts of an aerospace build — walking the floor for FOD and housekeeping, reviewing configuration control in practice, a mock audit — are worth doing in person, and I'll say so when that's the case.
Certify once, not twice.
Thirty minutes, no charge, no obligation. Tell me what you make, who your customers are and what state your system is in, and I'll tell you what certification would take — and which parts are worth building now for the revision that's coming.
Find out where you stand before you spend anything.
Sixty-seven questions across every clause of ISO 9001, scored by section. Set aside 30 to 45 minutes. Free, and your answers save as you go.
ISO 9001, AS9100 and ISO 13485 consulting and courses for small and medium manufacturers. A one-person practice — you work with me, not an account manager.
- Phone
- (925) 557-8570
- [email protected]
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- 499 Highland Dr
Danville, CA 94526
Falcon Quality is an independent consultancy. It is not a certification body, a registrar or an accreditation organization, and it does not issue certificates. ISO 9001, AS9100 and ISO 13485 are the property of their respective standards organizations.