Avio Aero Built an Italian 3D Printing Hub That GE Could Not Ignore

The Other GE Additive Story

Most people who follow additive manufacturing know the Cincinnati side of GE's story: Morris Technologies, the LEAP fuel nozzle, the FAA's first approved AM engine part. But at the same time GE Aviation was building that playbook in Ohio, it was quietly doing something similar in northern Italy. A TCT Magazine profile on Avio Aero makes clear that the Cameri plant became a parallel success, and it may be just as important for understanding where aerospace AM is heading.

Avio Aero had supplied GE Aerospace for more than two decades before the two companies started working on an additive application. The project moved quickly: a technology was chosen, a material was selected, designs iterated, and the commercial case became obvious. GE responded the way it often does, it bought the company. Since the 2013 acquisition, Avio Aero has become one of the most scaled additive operations in aerospace.

What Cameri Actually Makes

The plant sits near the small town of Cameri in the Po Valley, not far from the Lockheed Martin F-35 final assembly line. It runs electron beam melting machines from Arcam, which GE acquired and folded into GE Additive. The EBM process uses a high-energy electron beam to fuse metal powder layer by layer inside a vacuum, and it is particularly good at printing TiAl, a titanium aluminide alloy that is half the weight of the nickel alloys normally used for turbine blades.

Those TiAl blades end up in the GE9X, the world's largest jet engine, which powers Boeing's 777X. Each blade is roughly arm-length and must withstand enormous centrifugal force and heat. The first GE9X engines with Cameri-built blades have already run, and the plant has been moving into continuous production. That is a long way from novelty parts and trade show demos.

Why TiAl Matters

Titanium aluminide is not new, but shaping it has always been hard. Casting TiAl requires expensive tooling and produces a lot of waste, and the material is brittle enough that conventional machining is not easy either. EBM sidesteps much of that by building the blade geometry directly from powder. The result is a part that saves weight where it counts: in the low-pressure turbine, where every gram matters for fuel burn.

GE has claimed the GE9X is up to 10 percent more fuel efficient than its predecessor, the GE90. The printed TiAl blades are not the whole reason, but they are a real piece of that improvement. Cameri's output also supports the LEAP engine family, the GEnx, and other programs. The plant has expanded several times and now hosts dozens of Arcam machines, including the newer Spectra H systems.

The Bigger Picture

Avio Aero's story is useful because it shows what happens when additive manufacturing stops being an R&D curiosity and starts acting like a supply chain. GE did not acquire Avio Aero for a headline; it acquired a supplier that had figured out how to print flight-critical parts repeatedly and at scale. The fact that this happened in parallel with the better-known Cincinnati work suggests GE was serious about AM as a manufacturing method, not just a marketing angle.

There are still limits. The plant makes specific components for specific engines, not whole engines, and EBM is not a universal solution. But Cameri is one of the clearest examples of additive manufacturing holding down a real job in aerospace production. That is rarer than the press releases make it sound.