The Aerospace Executive Podcast

DOT’s Two Biggest Priorities w/ Assistant Secretary Dan Edwards

Advanced Air Mobility, drones and commercial space launches are all adding complexity. Where is the DOT putting its resources, and what changes can we expect?  Dan Edwar

Become the Focused Expert: 10 Steps to a Successful Career

Success is easy to find when it’s broken down into the basics.   What are the 10 key ingredients of a successful career? How do you avoid the common pitfalls?   In th

F-104 Starfighter: Can a 60-Year-Old Fighter Jet Help America Win the Space Race?

One of the most unusual businesses in space starts with a Cold War fighter jet. Starfighters Space operates the world’s only Mach 2+ commercial fleet—a handful of F-104

AI & Warfighting: Can Dept of War Procurement Keep Up?

AI is opening up new warfighting capabilities, but behind the scenes, the government is constrained by power, energy, and compute. What happens when the government has a

Aerospace M&A is the Wild West: Latest M&A News w/ Meghan Welch & Hubert de la Vauvre

The GE Aerospace acquisition of CPP is in the news. But it’s not just defense tech that’s commanding massive multiples. Meghan Welch returns with her colleague, Hubert d

eVTOL vs. Helicopter: Is Vertical Aerospace Changing the Mission?

An American fighter goes down in hostile territory. Recovering the crew requires multiple aircraft, enormous resources, and putting even more lives at risk. What if an a

Heart Aerospace: Re-inventing the Regional Airliner

Money isn’t the only thing flowing into aerospace from Silicon Valley.   So are the ideas, the methods and the mindset! Anders Forslund, Founder and CEO of Heart Aeros

Turning Factories into Weapons of Asymmetric Warfare w/ Mach Industries CSO Nathan Diller

Defense is changing. Fast. For decades, weapons development was measured in years, sometimes decades. That model is being challenged. A new generation of defense-tech

Inside Albers Aerospace: Building a “Next-Gen Prime” w/ John Albers

In the defense industrial base, everyone knows the primes dominate the big programs, but that leaves a huge gap in the middle.  Startups don’t scale, the primes can’t mo

Aerospace is Losing Key Electronics to Data Centers: How Executives Can Respond

“The AI data center build-out is already the biggest infrastructure project, inflation-adjusted, that we've ever undertaken as a society.”  That’s Sebastian Schaal, co-f

From Manager to C-Suite: The Hardest Transition in Leadership w/ Bill Koch [Replay]

The transition from being a rockstar in your vertical to leading at the C-suite level is one of the hardest jumps in modern business.  Not because you aren’t capable, bu

IPOs Are Back and Changing Aerospace Deals, Here’s Why w/ Nick Fazioli [Replay]

Aerospace has always been a cyclical industry, one sector up, another down, capital moving cautiously between them. That’s not what’s happening right now. Every major sec

Inside FDH Aero’s Billion-Dollar Distribution Strategy w/ Ian Walsh [Replay]

Most people think the aerospace supply chain is crawling back to normal after the pandemic. But that’s not what’s happening. The industry is scaling in a permanently ele

Aerospace Companies Need a New Kind of Manager w/ Matt Gjertsen

What is the minimum level of leadership an aerospace company needs to survive constant change? Because technical excellence is not enough anymore. Aerospace and aviatio

The Upstream Metals Strategy Keeping Aerospace Moving w/ Kelly Thomas

The aerospace supply chain does not only break at final assembly. Some of the most important pressure points sit much farther upstream, inside the specialized materials b

What Private Equity Really Demands From Leaders w/ Maxwell Salazar

Private equity is no longer a small corner of the market that only dealmakers, investors, and portfolio executives need to understand. It is becoming one of the defining

Private Aviation Customers Are Changing: Here’s How Sentient Jet Is Adapting w/ Alan Walsh

Private aviation is no longer serving the same buyer, the same use case, or the same expectation set that it was built around twenty years ago. The old assumption was si

Business Aviation’s Next Chapter: Beyond Range, Speed, and Size

Business aviation has spent decades climbing the same performance ladder: more range, more speed, larger cabins, better engines, better avionics, and more capable aircraf

The Aircraft, Engines, and Business Models That Built Business Aviation w/ Richard Aboulafia and Kevin Michaels

Business aviation is often misunderstood because the aircraft are the most visible part of the story. The brands, the cabins, the speed, the ramp presence, and the cultur

The Inflection Point for Flight: Inside Electra Aero’s Quiet Revolution in Air Mobility (Replay)

In aerospace, we talk a lot about “the future of flight.” But most of that conversation has been driven by fantasy. Fully electric aircraft that can’t fly far enough, and