Large parts of the airframe of commercial aircraft work predominantly in compression. The lower shell of the fuselage and the upper wing covers are important examples. Airframe engineers are reticent upon applying sandwich materials for certain aircraft structures because of past problems with moisture ingress on such materials. Compression panels will therefore remain thin-walled structures for some time to come, and their weight is determined by buckling resistance and residual strength in compression. Composite panels tend to be critical in compression-after-impact residual strength. A relatively small impact during assembly or in operation can cause invisible or barely visible defect that will lead to local sub-laminate buckling under in-plane compression loads, thus causing delamination and catastrophic failure. For example, residual strength due to BVID (barely visible impact damage) caused by a 135 J impact can be as little as 40% of the pristine strength - depending on the lay-up and overall part stiffness. For this reason, it is a common practice today to conservatively limit the allowable strains for a composite aerospace compression panel. Metallic panels tend to be more critical in buckling. Since airworthiness authorities allow metallic aircraft panels to be designed for post-buckling with limited plastic deformation at the ultimate load, the principal material characteristic for determining the weight of such a panel is the compressive yield strength. Large improvements in compressive yield strength have been made over the past decade, and future high-strength alloys have the potential to reduce the weight of metallic compression panels even further. Stress analyses were undertaken to determine the theoretical weight of a fully optimized compression panel as a function of the design load flow. The resulting design graphs allow a fair comparison of both material types for aerospace compression panels. They show that metallic structure is usually lighter in weight than composites for compression dominated panels.