Reducing weight is an important pursuit in aircraft design and manufacturing, which can endow military aircraft with stronger flight performance and improve the fuel economy of civil aviation aircraft. But if the thickness of the plate shaped components on the aircraft is too thin, it will face problems of insufficient strength and stiffness. Compared to adding supporting frames, adding lightweight and rigid sandwich materials between two layers of panels can significantly improve load-bearing capacity without significantly increasing weight.

A layer of light wood or foam plastic core material is filled between the inner and outer surfaces of the skin made of glass fiber reinforced epoxy resin (glass fiber reinforced plastic). Light wood was also one of the earliest sandwich materials used in airplanes, such as the famous wooden aircraft during World War II - the British Mosquito Bomber, which was made of plywood with two layers of birch wood sandwiched between one layer of light wood.

In the modern aviation industry, the core materials used include honeycomb structure and foam plastics. The seemingly weak honeycomb can withstand the crushing of heavy trucks because the stable honeycomb like grid structure hinders buckling deformation, which is similar to the principle that corrugated cardboard boxes have strong compressive strength.

Aluminum is the most commonly used metal on airplanes, so it is natural to use a structure consisting of aluminum alloy panels and aluminum honeycomb sandwich panels.