PODCAST · news
The Aerospace Executive Podcast
by Craig Picken
How Top Aerospace Executives Set the Vision, Grow Their Business & Develop Talent
Episodes
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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-founder and Managing Director of Luminovo, an AI software company specializing in electronics supply chain management. I wanted to...
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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, but because the job changes faster than anyone prepares you for, and the timeline to become effective has collapsed from years to...
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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 sector is ripping at the same time, for completely different reasons. Commercial is coming back online. Aftermarket and MRO have...
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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 elevated demand environment. Commercial aviation is rebuilding. Defense budgets are structurally higher. New platforms like EVTOL,...
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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 aviation companies are being pushed to move faster, scale highly specialized teams, cut through bureaucracy, and make decisions before...
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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 businesses; most of the industry only notices when something goes wrong. High-purity aluminum, specialty alloys, casting…
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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 forces in business. More industries are being consolidated. More founder-led companies are being acquired. More executives are...
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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 simple: private aviation was mainly for the already-initiated: aircraft owners, experienced charter users, corporate flight...
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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 aircraft. That evolution created the modern business jet market and pushed the high end into a category that would have been difficult...
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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 culture around private aircraft tend to dominate the public imagination. But the industry was not built around image. It was built...
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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 technologies that look good in a render but can’t sustain the physics or economics of real aviation. That’s why what Electra...
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The New Defense Procurement Model: Faster, Smarter, More Investable w/ Meghan Welch
Defense is not just changing because the technology is changing. It is changing because the old way of buying, building, funding, and deploying that technology no longer matches the speed of the threat. For decades, aerospace and defense have been built around massive programs, long procurement...
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The Pro Sports of Business: What PE Demands From Aerospace Leaders w/ Adam Coffey
Private equity is often talked about like it’s either a villain or a jackpot. Founders fear it, corporate executives romanticize it, employees hear horror stories, and everyone seems to have an opinion about what happens when PE walks into a business. But that framing misses the bigger shift...
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Space Infrastructure…The New Logistics Opportunity w/ Dr. Robert Sproles
The space industry is treated like it’s a collection of launches - rockets, satellites, new vehicles, and programs. But that framing misses what’s actually being built right now and how significant it is. What’s happening in space is not just a launch boom. It’s the early construction of a...
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$100 Oil, Spirit Airlines and Why Aerospace Buyers Are Still Leaning In w/ Bill Alderman
Oil is $100, airline losses are starting to show up, and Spirit’s collapse is exposing just how hard it is to run an ultra-low-cost model when low cost has disappeared. Any one of those signals could make buyers cautious. Taken together, they should raise a bigger question: why are buyers inside...
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IPOs Are Back and Changing Aerospace Deals, Here’s Why w/ Nick Fazioli
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 sector is ripping at the same time, for completely different reasons. Commercial is coming back online. Aftermarket and MRO have...
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Controlling Catastrophe: Why Captive Insurance Makes Sense w/ John C. Averill and Andy Shuttleworth
Most operators think insurance is about protection. Buy a policy, transfer the risk, move on. But what if that model is quietly draining your margins instead of protecting them? Because here’s the reality: in aviation, it’s not the catastrophic losses that kill your business; it’s everything…
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Want Long-Term Career Relevance? Rebrand Don’t Reinvent w/ Matt Johnson
Listening to 70s Southern rock, you can’t help but notice how easily it could fit into today’s rotation. Then you look at something like Hyrox. It shows up as new, but it’s actually CrossFit, same foundation, different packaging. Nothing changed. They’re just being branded differently. And that...
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Defense Acquisition Has Changed...Here’s How to Win Contracts Today w/ Gemo Yesil [REPLAY]
Today’s defense landscape is chaotic and fast-moving. Drones, AI, autonomy, and cyber threats are reshaping how wars are fought…and how the Pentagon spends. For companies and CEOs, the barrier to entry has never been lower. Any startup with a pitch deck and some funding can say they're in...
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Inside FDH Aero’s Billion-Dollar Distribution Strategy w/ Ian Walsh
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 elevated demand environment. Commercial aviation is rebuilding. Defense budgets are structurally higher. New platforms like EVTOL,...
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VSE Corporation: The Hottest Stock in Aerospace w/ John Cuomo [Replay]
Most people think turning around a 60-year-old public company is about cost cuts, headcount reductions, and financial engineering. But real transformation doesn’t start on the income statement. It starts when you realize the house you just bought, the one on the great street, in the great...
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The Laminar Flow Breakthrough Changing Business Aviation w/ Paul Touw
For decades, business aviation has advanced in careful, incremental steps. Better avionics, quieter cabins, and marginal fuel improvements. But true aerodynamic breakthroughs are rare, generational, even. In this highlight from a previous episode of The Aerospace Executive Podcast, we revisit a...
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India: Aerospace’s Next Manufacturing Powerhouse w/ Vishal Sanghavi
In aerospace and defense, a structural shift in global manufacturing is underway. Supply chains are strained, skilled labor is scarce, and production backlogs are testing relationships between OEMs and suppliers across the globe. So the industry is being forced to look for answers in new places....
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Cosmic Land Grab: Inside the New Space Arms Race w/ Tory Bruno REPLAY
The new space race is beginning; It’s not just between nations, but between commercial giants, shadow governments, and emerging players staking claims to orbits that are becoming dangerously crowded. The world is entering an era where control of the orbits will define global power. What’s fueling...
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Every A&D Sector Is Up, Here’s Why That Matters w/ Bill Alderman & Ryan Kirby
Most people think a “hot” M&A market means: inflated prices, reckless buyers, and deals that will eventually fall apart. That’s not what we’re seeing in aerospace and defense right now. What we’re watching instead is something far more unusual and powerful. Every major segment of the industry is...
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Inside the Push to Reshore and Rebuild U.S. Manufacturing w/ Alex Krutz
For decades, we’ve told ourselves that manufacturing is something advanced economies naturally outgrow. That once you move into services, data, and software, heavy industry becomes optional, nice to have, but not essential. But from a national and economic security perspective, America can’t…
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Charter Clients Want Speed, So Why Are Bookings Still Slow? w/ Greg Johnson
For an industry that promises speed and convenience, booking a charter flight is still painfully slow. Customers pay a premium for flexibility and time, but the booking experience feels stuck in another era. Manual steps, disconnected systems, PDFs bouncing around, and payment delays that leave…
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Aviation Runs on Speech. Almost None of It Becomes Data w/ Amir Haramaty
In aviation, the majority of operational intelligence lives in speech, but most of it is uncaptured or unstructured. It exists in radio calls, verbal handoffs, inspections, checklists, maintenance conversations, and moment-to-moment judgments made on the ground and in the air. That information...
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The Hardest Transition in Leadership w/ Bill Koch
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, but because the job changes faster than anyone prepares you for, and the timeline to become effective has collapsed from years to...
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Business Aviation Is Stuck in the Past, This is What It Needs w/ Jack Lambert
Private aviation has a reputation problem, and it’s not because demand is slow, but because the system behind it is still operating like it’s 1998. Too many operators are stuck in old behaviors: seven brokers on a single trip, opaque pricing, and a customer experience that feels more like chasing...
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Thin Film Solar Panels Unlock Maneuverability Without Regret in Space w/ Paul Warley
Most people talk about space power like it’s a solved problem. Big arrays, rigid panels, high-efficiency silicon; the same architecture we’ve been flying for decades. But the more you look at where national security and commercial space are headed, the clearer it becomes: our power systems…
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He Learned How to Fly at Age 43, and then Circumnavigated the Earth w/ Robert DeLaurentis
Flying around the world is rare. Doing it solo is even rarer. Doing it twice, once along the equator and once over both poles, is unheard of. But that’s exactly what entrepreneur and aviator, Robert DeLaurentis, achieved. And he didn’t do it in a jet with a support crew on standby. He did it in...
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The Next Great Leap in Jet Design: Otto Aviation’s Laminar Flow Revolution w/ Paul Touw
For decades, business aviation has advanced in small, predictable steps. Quieter cabins, digital cockpits, incremental gains in fuel efficiency. But real breakthroughs are generational. What Otto Aviation is building may be the most significant leap in private jet design since the invention of…
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The Inflection Point for Flight: Inside Electra Aero's Quiet Revolution in Air Mobility w/ Marc Allen
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 technologies that look good in a render but can't sustain the physics or economics of real aviation. That's why what Electra...
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Cosmic Land Grab: Inside the New Space Arms Race w/ Tory Bruno [Replay]
The new space race is beginning; It’s not just between nations, but between commercial giants, shadow governments, and emerging players staking claims to orbits that are becoming dangerously crowded. The world is entering an era where control of the orbits will define global power. What’s fueling...
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Valuations in Aerospace & Defense: What Really Drives the Price? w/ Bill Alderman
Most people think valuations come down to simple formulas: EBITDA multiples, discounted cash flows, and comps. The reality in aerospace and defense is far more complex. That’s the reason so many owners and even investors misunderstand how acquisitions actually work in this industry. The truth is,...
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The Harsh Truth About Cash in PE-Backed Aerospace Companies w/ Bob Gold
In today’s private equity landscape, the CFO role has become one of the most difficult and misunderstood jobs in the business world. Everybody thinks it’s about reporting numbers, tracking financials, and cutting costs. But in reality, being a PE-backed CFO means living at the intersection of…
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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 move fast, and decades of consolidation have hollowed out the space in between. For years, everyone has recognized this gap, but no...
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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 move fast, and decades of consolidation have hollowed out the space in between. For years, everyone has recognized this gap, but no...
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The Materials Flywheel: How AI is Powering Next-Gen Aerospace w/ Joseph Krause
In aerospace and defense, every breakthrough is built on material science. From the alloys powering jet engines to the composites shielding spacecraft, innovation isn’t just about design—it’s about what the machines are made of. Yet the way we discover and scale new materials hasn’t meaningfully...
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The Future of Aerospace Belongs to Small, Agile Innovators (If They Can Survive) w/ Hamed Khalkhali
In aviation, the most transformative breakthroughs often take place far above the commercial flight lanes, and far below the public radar. But in today’s defense and aerospace economy, those breakthroughs are harder than ever for small companies to bring to life. Government budgets overwhelmingly...
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Effective Crews: Why AI Is Reshaping the Flight Deck & C-Suite w/Eric Olson
As AI continues to reshape everything from medicine to flight decks, the question isn’t whether it’s coming to your organization; it’s whether leaders are ready for it. The future belongs to executives who can blend critical thinking with adaptive leadership, who can shed old assumptions and...
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M&A Check-In: Why Job Shops Are Now Worth Millions w/ Bill Alderman
Commercial aviation is booming, but not for the reasons you'd expect. While the media fixates on tariffs, inflation, and geopolitical risks, industry insiders are seeing a very different picture. Airline profits are up, demand is strong, and aircraft backlogs are stretching eight years into the...
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Cosmic Land Grab: Inside the New Space Arms Race w/ Tory Bruno
The new space race is beginning; It’s not just between nations, but between commercial giants, shadow governments, and emerging players staking claims to orbits that are becoming dangerously crowded. The world is entering an era where control of the orbits will define global power. What’s fueling...
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The Problem With Aviation Accident Investigations (And How to Fix It) w/ Eckhard Jann
A fully loaded airliner lined up to land on a taxiway where four fuel-packed jets were waiting to depart. A catastrophic crash was avoided—by just 59 feet. What caused the near-miss? Not a single pilot’s error, but a systemic breakdown: fatigue, communication failures, flawed assumptions, and...
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Defense Acquisition Has Changed..Here’s How to Win Contracts Today w/ Gemo Yesil
Today’s defense landscape is chaotic and fast-moving. Drones, AI, autonomy, and cyber threats are reshaping how wars are fought…and how the Pentagon spends. For companies and CEOs, the barrier to entry has never been lower. Any startup with a pitch deck and some funding can say they're in...
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Mission-Ready Mindset: Inside the Largest Private Fleet of Water Bombers in the U.S. w/ Sam Davis
Planes scooping water from lakes. Crews flying into firestorms. Mechanics maintaining aircraft in warzone-like conditions. It sounds like a military operation, because in many ways, it is. As wildfires grow more frequent, more destructive, and more deadly, the national spotlight is turning to one...
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What It Really Takes to Defend the Homeland w/ Gen. Glen VanHerck
Drones flying over Air Force bases. Unidentified aerial systems evading detection. A homeland vulnerable to $1,000 weapons while billion-dollar jets sit powerless. It’s not the plot of a futuristic war movie. It’s the uncomfortable reality facing U.S. defense leaders today. In this episode, I’m...
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Bridging the Financial Gap Between the C-Suite and the Factory Floor w/ Dr. Kevin Koharki
In complex industries like aerospace, defense, and manufacturing, there’s a dangerous disconnect between the boardroom and the factory floor. Executives focus on margins, growth, and shareholder value—but the employees making daily decisions often don’t understand how their work impacts the…
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Extreme Ownership: The Real Key to Executive Success (Replay)
“You go do your thing—I’ve got this.” The words every CEO wants to hear. It means the job will get done – no excuses!. That’s real ownership—not just doing tasks but taking full responsibility for results, owning the outcome. But can you teach that mindset? In this episode, we get straight into...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Aerospace Executive Podcast have?
The Aerospace Executive Podcast currently has 321 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Aerospace Executive Podcast about?
How Top Aerospace Executives Set the Vision, Grow Their Business & Develop Talent
How often does The Aerospace Executive Podcast release new episodes?
The Aerospace Executive Podcast publishes regularly with 321 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to The Aerospace Executive Podcast?
You can listen to The Aerospace Executive Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Aerospace Executive Podcast?
The Aerospace Executive Podcast is created and hosted by Craig Picken.
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