Expertise

Development assurance strategising is a high-leverage activity. Use it to tailor your organisational architecture and development planning, then reap the rewards in risk burn-down, early error detection and the absence of surprises late in the programme. Done well, the assurance regime is designed deliberately against ARP4754 objectives rather than inherited as a stack of templates — and the organisation itself is treated as part of the system being engineered, with its interfaces, ownership boundaries and failure modes made explicit. The payoff is a plan you can actually execute to, and evidence that accrues as you go instead of being reconstructed under deadline pressure.

Certification is won in the planning, not demonstrated at the end. I build the compliance argument from the outset — mapping the means of compliance, the planning and compliance-demonstration documents, and the evidence trail back to the applicable basis (FAA/EASA Part 23, 25 & 33). Authority engagement is handled as a working relationship: early alignment on approach, credible planning documents, and audit readiness that holds up because the underlying discipline is real. The aim is no surprises for the applicant or the authority.

Full-lifecycle systems engineering, from function and architecture definition, trade studies, requirements capture, integration and V&V — ensuring robust traceability across all of these elements.

From in-depth planning through hands-on integration and test, coordinating across safety, security, design, avionics, electrical, flight test and production.

My track record spans control systems with mechanical, electrical, pneumatic and hydraulic elements; no matter the label put on the system, my focus is on the required functionality, the architecture, and ensuring assurance obligations are reconciled early, not fought over late.

Every programme’s success rests on customer-supplier relations, and the same principles govern both interfaces. I have worked both sides of this divide — as the embedded supplier and as the OEM-side focal — and seen first-hand how much a successful relationship depends on mutual respect and openness. It starts with alignment on the objectives, then proceeds with a clear-eyed, blame-free approach to the work: challenge to deliver, but stay flexible and offer support, with the end goal always in mind.

I operate comfortably as a programme-level focal, connecting multidisciplinary teams in pursuit of a shared goal. From bid support to planning and resource forecasting to the day-to-day coordination that keeps distributed teams pointed at the same milestones. The style is authority through clarity rather than hierarchy — making the plan, the interfaces and the trade-offs legible enough that people align because the reasoning is sound.

When systems misbehave in service, I run structured, evidence-based investigations and avoid jumping to early conclusions — Root Cause Analysis and Six Sigma methods applied from symptom to design-change approval and fleet rollout across production and retrofit.