The problem
Export control in aerospace covers two very different things. Tangible items (parts, assemblies, hardware) are the intuitive half: they are physical, countable, and they cross borders visibly.
Intangible transfer is the harder half. A drawing opened from the wrong country, a specification attached to an email, a database reachable by the wrong account — each is a transfer, and none of them looks like a shipment.
What we did
We ran a conformity programme covering both.
Why it matters beyond compliance
Once you take intangible transfer seriously, export control stops being a document-control exercise and becomes a question of who can reach which data, from where. That is an engineering problem before it is a legal one, and it is the same question that decides where your infrastructure is allowed to run.
It is also why we treat data residency as a design constraint rather than a procurement detail on every engagement since.