"The Data Gap Is Our Biggest Challenge": An Interview with Dr. Alicia Fontaine on Market Research in Aerospace and Defence
Introduction
Dr. Alicia Fontaine is a fictional but representative voice of a growing cohort of senior market intelligence professionals who have built careers at the intersection of aerospace engineering, defence procurement, and strategic market analysis. With two decades of experience spanning roles at a Tier 1 defence prime contractor, a boutique aerospace advisory firm, and her current position as Head of Market Intelligence at a pan-European aerospace consortium, Dr. Fontaine has a uniquely panoramic view of how market research functions — and frequently struggles — in one of the world's most opaque and high-stakes industries. We sat down with her to discuss the peculiarities of aerospace and defence market research, the impact of geopolitical volatility, and how the research community can raise its game.
"Aerospace and defence is not a sector where you can simply run a survey and call it market research. The decision-making architecture is fundamentally different from any commercial industry."
Q: Let's start with the basics. How is market research in aerospace and defence fundamentally different from other industries?
Dr. Fontaine: The differences are profound, and they start with the customer. In most consumer or B2B markets, you have a relatively distributed customer base — thousands or millions of buyers whose aggregate behavior you can study statistically. In aerospace and defence, particularly in the defence segment, you are frequently dealing with a monopsony or near-monopsony: a single government customer — the Ministry of Defence, the Department of Defense, NATO procurement bodies — whose budget decisions are made through political and strategic processes that market research methodologies were not designed to model.
What this means practically is that traditional market sizing exercises are not particularly useful in isolation. Knowing that the global defence electronics market is worth approximately $130 billion annually tells you relatively little if you cannot model the procurement cycles, capability gaps, and political priorities of the specific national customers you are targeting. The research value-add in this sector comes from decision intelligence — understanding how procurement decisions are actually made, who the key stakeholders are, what the capability requirement documents say, and how budget cycles align with technology readiness timelines.
Q: You mentioned the global defence electronics market. Can you give us a broader picture of where the aerospace and defence sector stands right now?
Dr. Fontaine: It is a sector experiencing a generational inflection point. The global aerospace and defence market was valued at approximately $925 billion in 2023, with the commercial aerospace segment recovering strongly post-COVID — Airbus and Boeing combined delivered over 1,200 commercial aircraft in 2023, the highest since the pandemic. The defence segment, meanwhile, has seen extraordinary budget expansion driven by the conflict in Ukraine, China's military modernization, and NATO member states rushing to meet the 2% of GDP defence spending target. Global defence spending crossed $2.2 trillion in 2023 for the first time in history, according to SIPRI.
The commercial space segment is another area of explosive growth. The Space Economy is now estimated at over $630 billion globally, with launch costs having fallen by more than 95% over the past two decades due to SpaceX's reusable rocket technology. This has democratized access to orbit and created entirely new commercial markets in satellite broadband, Earth observation, and space-based logistics that simply did not exist a decade ago.
Q: Where do market researchers most commonly go wrong in this sector?
Dr. Fontaine: Several areas come to mind. The first is overreliance on public procurement data as a proxy for market intelligence. Government contract databases — like SAM.gov in the United States or Find a Tender in the United Kingdom — contain valuable information, but they are lagging indicators. By the time a contract is publicly awarded, the competitive intelligence window has largely closed. The work that matters most happens in the pre-solicitation phase: understanding emerging capability requirements, participating in industry days, building relationships with programme offices, and tracking R&D funding through mechanisms like the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) or the UK's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl).
The second common mistake is treating defence and civil aerospace as a unified market. The demand drivers, customer bases, regulatory environments, and competitive dynamics are so different that conflating them in a single research framework almost always produces misleading conclusions. Defence procurement is governed by regulations like the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and the EU's Common Military List. Commercial aerospace is governed by airworthiness authorities like the FAA and EASA. These are fundamentally different market ecosystems, even when the underlying technologies overlap.
"The researchers who add the most value in this sector are those who have cultivated deep expert networks — former programme managers, retired flag officers, defence ministry officials. That relationship capital is the research asset that cannot be replicated by any AI platform."
Q: How has geopolitical volatility changed the research agenda for the sector?
Dr. Fontaine: Enormously. The research questions that were on the agenda in 2019 — sustainable aviation fuel adoption, MRO market consolidation, commercial air traffic recovery — have been supplemented by an urgent new research agenda: European defence industrial base capacity, hypersonic missile technology proliferation, supply chain sovereignty for critical materials like titanium and rare earth elements, and the implications of great power competition for commercial satellite operations.
For market researchers, this geopolitical volatility creates both challenges and opportunities. The challenge is that many of the most consequential market dynamics are now occurring in classified or semi-classified contexts that are inaccessible to standard research methodologies. The opportunity is that defence ministries, prime contractors, and national aerospace agencies are investing significantly in open-source intelligence (OSINT) and competitive analysis capabilities — and they are willing to pay premium prices for research that helps them make sense of a complex and rapidly changing environment.
Q: What tools and frameworks do you rely on most in your own research practice?
Dr. Fontaine: For secondary research, I rely heavily on Jane's (now Janes) for defence capabilities and procurement data, Flight Global for commercial aerospace data, and Avascent and Teal Group for defence market sizing. SIPRI's Military Expenditure Database is indispensable for tracking global defence budget trends. The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) and ASD-Europe publish excellent industry surveys and economic impact reports.
For primary research, expert interviews conducted under appropriate confidentiality protocols remain the cornerstone methodology. We supplement these with structured war-gaming exercises — scenario planning workshops with cross-functional teams that stress-test market assumptions against geopolitical risk scenarios. For commercial aerospace work, we also use airline financial filings, aircraft order books maintained by Cirium and Ascend by Cirium, and MRO spend benchmarking data from Oliver Wyman's annual MRO survey.
On the analytical framework side, I am a strong advocate for Competitive Intelligence frameworks adapted from the military domain — specifically, Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB) adapted for commercial competitive analysis. The discipline that military intelligence applies to understanding adversary capabilities and intentions translates remarkably well to understanding competitor strategies in a defence procurement context.
Q: What advice would you give to a market researcher looking to build a career specializing in aerospace and defence?
Dr. Fontaine: Three things. First, invest in technical literacy. You do not need to be an aerospace engineer, but you need to be able to read a request for proposal, understand basic aircraft performance parameters, distinguish between different missile guidance technologies, and have working knowledge of how defence acquisition programmes are structured. Without this foundation, you will always be dependent on others to interpret your own research findings.
Second, build your network patiently and ethically. This sector runs on relationships and trust. The expert network that will distinguish your research practice cannot be built quickly — it requires years of conference attendance, genuine intellectual engagement with the sector's challenges, and a reputation for discretion and accuracy.
Third, embrace ambiguity. In aerospace and defence, you will rarely have complete information. The most valuable skill is the ability to make well-calibrated assessments under uncertainty — to say not just what you know, but what you know about what you do not know. That epistemic discipline is what separates genuinely useful defence market intelligence from expensive speculation dressed up in a professional-looking report.
Conclusion
Dr. Fontaine's insights underscore a broader truth about aerospace and defence research: it demands a fundamentally different posture than most market research disciplines. Success in this sector requires technical fluency, geopolitical literacy, deep expert relationships, and a comfort with navigating information environments where the most important signals are often deliberately obscured. For research professionals willing to make that investment, aerospace and defence offers one of the most intellectually demanding and commercially significant specializations in the entire market research profession.