Many years ago, after making the transition from Part 135 to Part 91 operations and landing a job as chief pilot for a Fortune 500 flight department, I looked at the aviation director job with both arrogance and naïveté. My boss was a decent guy, and he took good care of me. But he used to talk about all this other stuff he had to do, how many meetings he had to attend, and all the budgets he had to build. I remember thinking, “Well, it can’t be that hard.” Even after I earned my CAM credential, a year after I was hired, I still didn’t appreciate the difference between my position and his. I was like, “I’ll figure it out.”
Then I was hired to be an aviation director for a large energy provider in the Midwest — not only run the department but also build it from scratch. Four years later, the department consisted of four jets, one helicopter, over thirty people, and two locations. The amount of knowledge I needed but didn’t have would have filled volumes. Fortunately, I had very patient supervisors, business partners, and team members, so everything worked. Looking back on it now, the most gaping hole in my expertise was my lack of business knowledge. I didn’t understand the language of business, and even though I had run an aviation business earlier in my career, my financial acumen wasn’t anywhere near where it needed to be. Today, when an aspiring aviation leader asks me about advanced degrees they should pursue, I tell them without hesitation, “Get an MBA.” Sometimes, they look at me like they didn’t hear me accurately, and they’ll ask why. In response, I tell them: “The aviation department is a business unit, not a flying club. To run it like a business, you need to understand how businesses run.”
Steve Brechter, the senior advisor for operations at Gray Stone Advisors, wrote a chapter in The Business Aviation Book: Leading Operational Excellence called “The Changing Role of the Aviation Director.” When Mike Nichols, my co-editor/author, and I mapped out the book, we understood the need for financial material, but we didn’t have a context that captured how critical financial knowledge was. Steve came to us with the idea for his chapter, and the rest is history. It became the first chapter in the book. In that chapter, he emphasizes three important competencies for the aviation director that fall under business knowledge.
The first competency is the necessity to understand the language of business. To communicate with executives in the C-Suite, with business partners, and peers in the company, the aviation director needs to set aside aviation language and employ business language. For those of us reared in the language of aviation, learning to speak like a businessperson is like learning a foreign tongue. We must study to understand the correct terms, translate our message into those terms, and then communicate it effectively. We also need to understand what’s happening in the company from a business perspective. We need to be intimate with the company’s vision, mission, and values to tailor the aviation department’s vision, mission, and values to best support the corporation. When the company adjusts its strategies to succeed, we need to understand why those adjustments were necessary and how the aviation department may need to flex to support those adjustments. Aviation departments that succeed do so because they align themselves with the companies they support. That alignment isn’t possible without the business knowledge to understand it.
The second business knowledge competency Steve emphasizes is for the aviation director to possess financial acumen. When most people think about business knowledge, this is probably what comes to mind. As an aviation director, you need to know your department’s budget backward, forward, and sideways. You need to understand fixed costs, variable costs, and all the sub-elements of each. You need to know how the financial folks in your company code these costs, and if there aren’t codes for certain aviation-specific budget items, work with them to create those codes. You need to be able to justify the costs from a value-added perspective and be able to discuss them line item by line item. There are other elements to consider besides the budget. The aviation director needs to understand asset management of high-value items, such as aircraft, support equipment, and company-owned facilities. This understanding must include knowledge of book, tax, and market depreciation. (Jim Lara the principal at Gray Stone and Steve’s co-worker, wrote an excellent chapter on that subject in The Business Aviation Book.)
The final business knowledge competency Steve mentions is one that might not immediately come to mind. It’s that of an internal marketing expert. In most corporations, the aviation department is a cost center. The aviation director must be able to make a case for the value that business aviation brings to the corporation. If called to present to the CEO or the board of directors, the aviation director must be able to demonstrate the value of the company’s investments in its aircraft, facilities, and personnel. Plus, if the aviation director is in the elevator with a vice-president or director in another area of the company and that person makes a comment about the aviation department’s costs, the aviation director should have some business-related facts handy to diplomatically explain the value the department brings to the company.
This discussion has just scratched the surface of this important topic. For more information about business knowledge and associated areas, see The Business Aviation Book: Leading Operational Excellence. There are chapters on budgeting, taxes, depreciation, and fleet planning.
Bibliography
Nichols, M. & Broyhill, C. (2025) The Business Aviation Book: Leading Operational Excellence. Dallas: Chris Broyhill Books, LLC.
