As a practitioner working in aerospace industry for almost a decade, I would like to bridge the gap between theory and practice. To this end, I identified 2 potential topics and 7 subtopics for a PhD research. The first topic concerns Service Control Towers for operational spare parts planning through which alert management, priority scheduling and the interaction between tactical and operational planning levels are addressed. The second topic is related to Spare parts pricing and inventory management subject to fierce competition from secondary markets in the mature and End of Life (EOL) phase.