How Top Aerospace Executives Set the Vision, Grow Their Business & Develop Talent
Episodes
Become the Focused Expert: 10 Steps to a Successful Career
29 Oct 2026 · 58 min
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 this special 200th episode of the podcast, we talk about the secrets to a million dollar career. If you don’t understand what you need to…
F-104 Starfighter: Can a 60-Year-Old Fighter Jet Help America Win the Space Race?
22 Oct 2026 · 43 min
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 Starfighters flown by a small cadre of pilots. Could these aircraft help shape America’s future in space? The company recently…
AI & Warfighting: Can Dept of War Procurement Keep Up?
15 Oct 2026 · 51 min
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 problem that can’t be solved by writing checks? Marc Murphy, CEO of Ignite Digital, joins me to share how AI is driving rapid…
Aerospace M&A is the Wild West: Latest M&A News w/ Meghan Welch & Hubert de la Vauvre
8 Oct 2026 · 59 min
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 de la Vauvre, to share the latest on M&A in aerospace, defense and beyond. Their experience leading Brown Gibbons Lang & Company…
eVTOL vs. Helicopter: Is Vertical Aerospace Changing the Mission?
1 Oct 2026 · 50 min
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 autonomous aircraft could fly into that same environment, extract the crew, and return without risking another pilot? That's one…
Heart Aerospace: Re-inventing the Regional Airliner
24 Sept 2026 · 46 min
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 Aerospace, joins me to talk about one of the biggest challenges in aviation: reinventing the regional aircraft. Heart believes…
Turning Factories into Weapons of Asymmetric Warfare w/ Mach Industries CSO Nathan Diller
17 Sept 2026 · 57 min
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 companies, backed by serious venture capital, is approaching the problem differently: Move fast. Build fast. Iterate fast. Mach…
Inside Albers Aerospace: Building a “Next-Gen Prime” w/ John Albers
3 Sept 2026 · 35 min
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…
Aerospace is Losing Key Electronics to Data Centers: How Executives Can Respond
27 Aug 2026 · 45 min
“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…
From Manager to C-Suite: The Hardest Transition in Leadership w/ Bill Koch [Replay]
20 Aug 2026 · 55 min
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…
IPOs Are Back and Changing Aerospace Deals, Here’s Why w/ Nick Fazioli [Replay]
13 Aug 2026 · 41 min
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…
Inside FDH Aero’s Billion-Dollar Distribution Strategy w/ Ian Walsh [Replay]
6 Aug 2026 · 39 min
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,…
Aerospace Companies Need a New Kind of Manager w/ Matt Gjertsen
30 Jul 2026 · 44 min
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…
The Upstream Metals Strategy Keeping Aerospace Moving w/ Kelly Thomas
23 Jul 2026 · 54 min
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…
What Private Equity Really Demands From Leaders w/ Maxwell Salazar
16 Jul 2026 · 44 min
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…
Private Aviation Customers Are Changing: Here’s How Sentient Jet Is Adapting w/ Alan Walsh
9 Jul 2026 · 50 min
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…
Business Aviation’s Next Chapter: Beyond Range, Speed, and Size
2 Jul 2026 · 36 min
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…
The Aircraft, Engines, and Business Models That Built Business Aviation w/ Richard Aboulafia and Kevin Michaels
25 Jun 2026 · 43 min
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…
The Inflection Point for Flight: Inside Electra Aero’s Quiet Revolution in Air Mobility (Replay)
11 Jun 2026 · 38 min
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…
The New Defense Procurement Model: Faster, Smarter, More Investable w/ Meghan Welch
4 Jun 2026 · 50 min
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…