India’s Aerospace Supply Chain: Missing Links

India’s aerospace industry is structurally bifurcated: it has built a globally competitive Tier-2/3 component base, yet still lacks the Tier-1 sub-system integration, unified type certification and serial final-assembly capability required to produce complete aircraft. This strategic-intelligence report identifies three "missing links" — integration, certification and final assembly — and shows why component capability does not automatically aggregate into aircraft capability. Against a $42B total addressable market in 2025, India’s serviceable obtainable market spans a 5× spread by 2035: $21.0B (bull), $11.7B (base) or $4.2B (bear), decided almost entirely by domestic execution inside the 2025–2027 policy window rather than by exogenous demand. The report scores India’s capability across ten dimensions (civil propulsion 1.5/10 vs a 9.5 global frontier), maps an 85%-concentrated engine supply chain, quantifies a 4.2-year average policy-implementation latency, and prescribes eight priority interventions — a National Aerospace Certification Authority, a $1.5B Tier-2/3 Supplier Development Fund, propulsion JVs and five domestic Tier-1 integrators — requiring ~$16.7B of coordinated capital. It also reads India’s emerging space-sector R&D-to-industrialisation model as an institutional analogue, without extending the report’s scope into space.