Precision parts from Hyderabad power Western skies

Jeh Aerospace was born in 2022 from a simple insight that hides a complicated truth: the world’s aircraft engines may be manufactured mostly in the West, but much of the precision that makes them fly can be machined in India—if you know exactly how. Co-founders Venkatesh Mudragalla and Vishal Rohit Sanghavi, both career aerospace professionals, set up a US-headquartered firm that manufactures entirely out of Hyderabad. “We’re focused on precision components for aero-engines,” says Mudragalla. “Every part we make is exported to the US and Western Europe, and every gram of tolerance matters.”

The company runs a 60,000-square-foot facility staffed by a little over a hundred people, machining hardmetal parts in nickel, cobalt alloys, specialised steels and titanium. These are the detailed parts that slot into the inlet, compressor and combustion sections of leading engine programmes. “Customers send us blueprints, often 2D,” he explains. “We convert them to 3D, perform manufacturing engineering, plan the process, do NC programming and then machine the components. It sounds linear; in reality it’s a loop of design intent, simulation and shop-floor learning.”

NC (Numerical Control) programming converts a part’s blueprint into precise toolpaths, speeds and step-by-step instructions that a numerical control machine follows to cut, drill and finish the component.

Jeh’s factory mixes threeaxis and five-axis mills, turnmills and high-rigidity turning centres, many imported from Germany, Japan and the US, with Indian equipment wherever specifications allow. “The machines are complex because the parts are complex,” says Mudragalla. “We’re consistently cutting hard alloys to microns, not millimetres. That’s the first challenge—tolerance. The second is the certifications and process discipline this industry demands; entry barriers are rightly high. Third is talent. India has manufactured for decades, but aerospace precision in the private sector is still young. People who truly understand aerospace standards are limited, so we invest heavily in training.”

The founders’ own CVs help shorten the distance from ambition to approval. Mudragalla spent about 12 years across supply chain, business development, project management and operations in large aerospace joint ventures, including programmes supplying Boeing , GE and Airbus. Sanghavi led major initiatives within the Tata Group and was CEO of the Tata–Boeing joint venture that builds Apache fuselages. “We know what ‘good’ looks like,” Mudragalla says. “We know what right looks like. That means we know how to plan a programme, what certificates are required, and how to prove conformity every time.”

Perfect part every time
Proving it “every time” is the point. “Delivering conforming parts consistently, on quality, is very hard,” he says. Jeh’s answer is to be a digital-native factory from day one. “From order receipt to dispatch, everything is digital. Our product lifecycle management, ERP, and manufacturing execution ride a single spine, so the shop floor is paperless.” The decision, he argues, was both philosophical and practical. “Aerospace is technologically advanced, but digital adoption has lagged. We wanted traceability at the click of a button—ten years from now you should be able to ask which heat-lot a billet came from and get the answer in seconds. If you collect and store data digitally, you can deploy changes quickly and you can use AI meaningfully.”

Behind that promise sits a data lake and an AI engine that generates live reports across the plant. “There is one version of the truth across the organisation,” he says. “Inspection readings flow automatically into the ERP when an instrument is used—no manual entry, no transcription error. We build poka-yoke (a Japanese quality control method) into tools and processes so errors are prevented upfront.” Machines are Industry 4.0-enabled, streaming telemetry for condition-based monitoring. “We track spindle behaviour, vibration, temperature. If a failure is looming, maintenance can intervene before quality is at risk.” The gains, he says, are tangible: “Because we’ve eliminated paper movement and manual collation, we run at roughly one-and-a-half times the efficiency of a typical precision-machining shop.”

Jeh’s “centre of aerospace skills” is the human counterpart to this digital backbone. “India produces over a million engineers a year, but there’s a gap between what the industry needs and what colleges produce,” Mudragalla says. The company hires diploma-level operators trained in chipmachining, mechanical engineers who can grow into manufacturing and quality roles, and increasingly computer-science graduates. “You’d be surprised how many AI and software skills we now need on a machining shop floor,” he adds with a smile. The average age is about 27—young enough to embrace new tools, old enough to respect processes.