Abstract: The aerospace industry has been at the forefront of laser material processing. At present it is an industry that is identified with the more traditional laser systems such as continuous wave (cw) Nd-YAG lasers for such applications as welding and cutting and pulsed Nd-YAG lasers for drilling and shock-peening. These laser systems have high average powers in the hundreds and thousands of Watts and high pulse energies in the tens of Joules. This has allowed them to process aerospace materials at commercially attractive cycle times, but the disadvantage of using these systems has been the collateral damage inflicted on a component due to micro cracking in turbine blades, delamination of thermal barrier coatings and their associated heat affected zones. One way to eliminate the problems associated with this type of damage is to process with ultra fast ultra short laser pulses where the laser material interaction time is of the same order as the electron-phonon coupling time. This paper investigates micro machining of a range of aerospace materials but paying special attention to lightweight composite aerospace materials. The paper compares the micromachining results from a new and novel picosecond high repetition rate fibre laser system and a femtosecond laser source.