Aerospace & aviation

Insurance for aerospace and aviation businesses

Yes — Apex places insurance for UK aerospace and aviation businesses: professional indemnity for design, engineering and airworthiness consultants, and aviation products and grounding liability for the firms that make and supply parts. We arrange it through the specialist Lloyd’s aviation market, with the worldwide and US jurisdiction that aerospace supply contracts demand, and the certificates your primes ask for.

Part of: Commercial insurance

In short

Aerospace and aviation is a specialist class, written in the Lloyd’s aviation market rather than by standard commercial insurers. A design or stress-analysis error, a certification sign-off, or a single defective component can ground an entire fleet — so the cover has to match the exposure. UK aerospace firms typically need professional indemnity for consultancy and design work, aviation products liability and grounding liability for parts and components, and often employers’ and public liability, product recall and cyber alongside. Prime contractors such as Airbus, Rolls-Royce and Leonardo, and their tier-one suppliers, usually set the limits, require worldwide including US jurisdiction, and ask to be named on a certificate. We place the programme through the aviation market and make sure it meets the contract.

Who this is for

‘Aerospace and aviation’ covers a wide range of UK businesses, and the cover that leads depends on what you actually do:

What you do	The cover that leads
Design, stress and analysis consultancy	Professional indemnity
Airworthiness, certification and design/production organisation support	Professional indemnity
Making parts, components or assemblies	Aviation products and grounding liability
Avionics, software and systems	Professional indemnity plus products liability
Maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO)	Products liability and hangarkeepers
Drone and UAV survey or inspection	Aviation and PI — see drone survey operators
Space, satellite and launch-adjacent	Specialist emerging-risk cover — see space and satellite insurance

Most established firms are a blend — a consultancy that also supplies hardware needs both the professional and the products sides arranged together, not in separate silos.

The covers aerospace firms actually need

For an aerospace or aviation business, the programme usually pulls from a familiar set of covers:

Professional indemnity — for the advice, design, analysis and certification work, where the loss is the cost of putting a mistake right. See aviation insurance for how the class fits together.
Aviation products liability — your legal liability if a part or component you designed, made or supplied causes injury or damage after it is in service.
Grounding liability — third-party cover for the loss of use when a fleet is grounded over a suspected defect in your product, explained below.
Product recall — the cost of identifying, retrieving and replacing an affected batch of components.
Employers’ liability — a legal requirement once you employ people, and public liability and cyber where the work and the contract call for them.
Hull and hangarkeepers — where you hold, move or work on aircraft; see aviation hull insurance.

Why standard cover will not respond

Three things stop a standard commercial or PI policy from responding to an aerospace exposure:

The market. Aviation is underwritten by specialist Lloyd’s aviation syndicates. A standard PI or commercial policy commonly excludes aviation products altogether — see aviation insurance.
Jurisdiction. Aerospace supply chains are US-facing, and products and grounding claims are litigated in US courts. Cover has to be written worldwide including the USA and Canada, where a standard UK policy is often written to exclude them — see US-jurisdiction professional indemnity and US-jurisdiction public liability.
Contract requirements. A prime sets minimum limits, asks to be named as an additional insured, and wants a certificate before you deliver — see additional insured and client naming and certificate of insurance. A policy that cannot meet the wording fails the contract, however good the price.

Grounding and products liability, explained

The exposure that makes aerospace supply a specialist risk is aggregation: one defective part can affect a whole fleet at once. Two covers do the heavy lifting:

Aviation products liability responds to your legal liability for injury or damage caused by a product you supplied, once it is in service.
Grounding liability is the aviation-specific extension. When an airworthiness authority — the UK CAA, EASA or the FAA — issues a mandatory order withdrawing aircraft from service because of an actual or suspected defect in your product, it responds to the resulting loss of use — including aircraft that are not themselves damaged but simply cannot fly — across the affected fleet, for as long as the grounding order stands.

Because a single occurrence can reach dozens of airframes together, the limit and the aggregation wording matter more here than almost anywhere else. That is precisely why the risk belongs in the aviation market, and why the broker who places it needs to read the contract as carefully as the policy.

Why place aerospace cover through Apex

Apex Insurance Brokers is an independent commercial insurance broker established in 2009 and based in Bristol — at the centre of the South West’s aerospace cluster, from Filton and the wider Airbus and Rolls-Royce supply chain to GKN, Leonardo and the West of England aerospace community. We are owned entirely by our directors and directly authorised by the FCA since 2016. We are not tied to any single insurer, and we have access to over 30 markets, including the Lloyd’s aviation syndicates — via wholesale — where products, grounding and aviation professional risks are written. Every client has a named broker who understands what a prime’s supply contract actually asks for.

Owned by its directors, not for sale. No consolidator, no private-equity owner, no external shareholders — and we have declined approaches to buy the firm. Read the Apex Independence Charter.
Independent, not tied. No single-insurer scheme, no in-house policy, no placement quotas — the recommendation is the one that fits, not the one we are paid to push.
Over 30 markets, including Lloyd’s. Specialist UK PI insurers and Lloyd’s syndicates via wholesale, so a risk that one underwriter dislikes can still be placed properly with another.
Usually three or four competing quotes, laid out side by side — limit, excess, retroactive date, exclusions and premium — with a plain-language note on the trade-offs.
The stay-put letter. If your existing cover is right, we say so in writing, free and without obligation. How the stay-put letter works.
A named broker all year. The person who places your cover is the person who picks up the phone at renewal, on a mid-term change, or when a letter of claim lands.
Director-level attention on claims. We help you notify circumstances early and in the right form, stay involved once the insurer’s panel solicitors are appointed, and tell you plainly where you stand.
Directly authorised by the FCA since 2016, not an appointed representative trading under someone else’s permissions.

Frequently asked

Do aerospace firms need professional indemnity or products liability?

It depends on what you do. Design, analysis and certification consultancies need professional indemnity, where the loss is the cost of correcting a mistake. Firms that make or supply parts need aviation products and grounding liability. Many established businesses do both, and need the two arranged together so nothing falls between them.

What is grounding liability?

It is third-party cover for loss of use when aircraft are grounded. When an airworthiness authority such as the CAA, EASA or FAA issues a mandatory order withdrawing aircraft over an actual or suspected defect in a component you supplied, grounding liability responds to the resulting loss of use — including aircraft that are not physically damaged but cannot fly — across the affected fleet until the order is lifted.

Our contract with a prime requires US jurisdiction and to be named as additional insured — can you arrange that?

Yes. Aerospace supply contracts routinely require worldwide including US jurisdiction and additional-insured naming, and that is written in the aviation market as standard. Once cover is bound we issue a certificate of insurance naming the party to the wording they have set — see US-jurisdiction professional indemnity and additional insured and client naming.

Do you cover drone and UAV operators, or space and satellite firms?

Yes. Drone and UAV survey work sits across aviation and professional indemnity — see drone survey operators insurance. Space, satellite and launch-adjacent risks are specialist emerging-risk classes — see space insurance and satellite insurance. Tell us what you do and we will place it in the right market.

Working in aerospace or aviation?

Tell us what you design, make or advise on, and any requirement your prime has set — we’ll place it through the aviation market with the right jurisdiction and the certificates your contract needs. Or call 0117 325 0027.

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Apex Insurance Brokers Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Registered in England and Wales, company number 07014570. This page is general information about aerospace and aviation insurance, not advice on your individual circumstances, and it does not guarantee that cover will be available or on what terms.