Sounding Board: Five Minutes With Heather Gordon, Martyn Fiddler Aviation Legal Director

Heather Gordon jokes that she’s looked down on by the rest of her aviation-focused family because she pursued a career in law. Still, her work—after some time spent in the space-law field—is firmly rooted in the business-aviation sector. She moved to the Isle of Man in 2007 and in 2013 joined aircraft import, ownership and tax specialists Martyn Fiddler Aviation. In short order she found herself helping to organize the Isle of Man Aviation Conference, which the company runs; for the last 10 editions, she has overseen it, though she is stepping down from organizational duties following this year’s 12th conference, held June 26. She also writes a substantial proportion of the company’s website content, which has become increasingly important since the COVID pandemic, and collates an annual report on the state of the industry.

Q: How did you end up in an aviation-law career, and what led to you taking on such a public-facing role within Martyn Fiddler?

A: I’m an out-and-out aviation baby, born and raised into it. I think I flew my first King Air when I was four—with a lot of cushions, and my dad supervising me at the time, quite obviously! My whole family business is in aviation. My dad’s done wonderful things, like buying airports, and all of my young life was involved with aviation.

I went off to become a lawyer, and I couldn’t really escape it, because what I studied was aviation law. I’d been working for financiers on the asset-finance aspects of business-aviation transactions, as well as some commercial and shipping work, and yachting work. But I wanted to find out the other side, so I joined Martyn Fiddler as in-house counsel.

I have a very naive tendency to say ‘Yes’ when people ask me to do things, and pretty much on my first day at Martyn Fiddler, the person that was running the aviation conference said, ‘Heather, could you help me find some speakers?’

Q: What provides the impetus for the writing you do for the company?

A: I love learning. I became a director of this business in 2017 and then we started doing a director’s course. So it was like, OK, I need to learn about the strategy and the leadership piece.

Understanding the accounts is one thing; being able to write a set of board minutes is one thing—there’s all this other stuff. And really, from taking that; from going on courses and self-education, and then wanting to do more of it and more of it, and asking more difficult questions—which I have to do as part of my day-to-day job anyway ... There are really simple ways of looking at the big questions, rather than the mountains that potentially are being created. Government is always a difficult one; politicians are always a difficult one. And when it comes to sustainability, you can’t wash the ocean. As much as we might want to, it’s not going to happen.

[Critics will] write what [they] are going to write: you can [be] in denial, or you can try and put something that’s different, that somebody actually wants to try and read and get involved with. Maybe. Hopefully. Perhaps.

Q: The report is unusually frank and plain-speaking, when compared to other similar papers published by people in the industry. How come?

A: During COVID we had possibly the biggest business opportunity we were ever, ever going to find, which was Brexit, and we couldn’t go out and tell people because we were stuck—literally stuck—in the Isle of Man. All our marketing and business-development was one-on-one—we did no advertising, no article-writing, nothing like that. We hired a marketing consultant, and he came up with some good points, and we realized that education and observation was a really good tool for getting our brand out.

The culmination of running a conference and having to get speakers to speak about potentially interesting things each year, and needing to write articles each week, and the fact that for other business development I attend conferences worldwide, [means that] quite a few people talk to me. As a business we are slightly removed, I would say, from the nitty gritty of operating an aircraft, but still wholly involved with the owners, the operators, the manufacturers. So we get quite honest conversations with them.

Just being really transparent [is] one of my core things—being open and honest and transparent about the conversations. I’m particularly cynical, and I get fed up of—without wanting to go blue—but, the bullshit that people come up with. I’ve been doing this for quite a long time; I’ve been actively in [business aviation] now for 17 years, over 10 years in my current role, and there’s only so many times you can hear, you know, ‘Optimistic about the future!
There’s amazing sales! We’ve sold this many!’ There is increasingly this frustration that I’m hearing from people, that everybody is spouting lovely things that they would love the world to look like, when in reality we just have to get on and do stuff.

Q: The sector seems to struggle to engage meaningfully with its critics, despite many efforts being made. Why is that, do you think?

A: A lot of people’s reaction [to anti-business-aviation protesters] is just to be incredibly defensive. But we have to change.
There was a panel at Corporate Jet Investor [in London, early in 2024] where the Green Party number two and [other protesters] gave their views. I took a few things from it: one was that their arguments seemed to boil down as much to wanting to save the planet as wanting to settle wealth imbalance. That seemed to be a core part of the argument—they were upset that some people had more, and they could afford to do things, and that there should be a redistribution of wealth—which I felt detracted from the argument on sustainability and the environment and the use of business aircraft. But also, they had absolutely no idea about their audience. It was kind of akin to telling the coal miners that the coal mine was about to shut. It was like: ‘You’re speaking to 600 people who will all lose their jobs and be unemployed if what you’re proposing takes place.’

The people who own these aircraft, they’re not going to stop flying—and they couldn’t care less whether we lose our jobs or not. They’ll just find another method to carry on. How are you going to change that? That’s the mentality that we need to go after. We as an industry need to improve what we’re doing and be transparent and honest and open about doing that in the timescales that have been set. But Mr. Big and Mrs. Big, they’re never going to stop doing that, no matter what. We just have to make it easier for them to utilize a better service and understand why that’s going to cost even more money at this moment, until we can bring [prices] down.

Q: It’s surely difficult to get such a wide and diverse industry to speak as one?

A: There’s a sort of hypocrisy in messaging that I always find interesting, and that just comes back to not being joined-up as an industry—and us within a small sector of a bigger industry as well. I remember [around] six or seven years ago at a conference, they had a few panels about the importance of business aviation and all the stuff that it does, and then they went into a connectivity panel and they were talking about the importance of streaming on flights because they really wanted to watch the game. I was like, ‘But I thought you were doing business on the flight? That doesn’t really flow—you guys need to talk to each other.’ But you see it everywhere: I mean, you see the guys who go out to protest about the environment and then they leave the place and all the litters on the ground.

I’ve got a great team—wonderful team. On the marketing side I’ve got a guy who’s just turned 21, a girl who’s just turned 30, I’m approaching 41, so we’ve got this decade in between each. And there’s so much stuff that’s lost in translation, even in between the three of us when we’re talking, and the different ways in which we think and do things. I don’t think we appreciate that enough in how we communicate: that actually what I say can mean something completely different to somebody half my age.

I think sustainability is a fascinating area, but there’s all sorts of other areas that I’m quite interested in. [Another one is] corporate governance. I want to bash most CEOs and directors over the head, and sort of say, ‘You’ve got to wake up.’ There’s such little education. I was watching a webinar the other day about; how do you make better directors? It’s very, very difficult. One, because of different generations and thoughts. I don’t want to be ageist and say, ‘The old boys club,’ even though there’s still a lot of that within aviation; but people will only learn when they want to learn. What we have to do is encourage them to want to change—and as part of their bigger overall business. Business aviation isn’t bad: it just needs to be used in the right way. But how you do that is where I’m still trying to get to.