Listen in as Chris Milligan, Bombardier vice president of pre-owned aircraft and flight operations, and Russ Bartlett, former U.S. Navy Blue Angel commanding officer and flight leader, give a peek into the upcoming Bombardier Safety Standdown 2025.
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Molly McMillin: Hello and welcome to today's BCA Podcast. We are so glad to have you. I'm Molly McMillin, Aviation Week managing editor for Business Aviation. So we thank you all for joining us. With us today is Chris Milligan, Bombardier vice president of pre-owned aircraft and flight operations, who's based in Dallas, and Russ Bartlett, a speaker and former U.S. Navy Blue Angel commanding officer and flight leader—or you might know him by his call sign of Boss. Thank you gentlemen for being here today. We really appreciate it.
Chris Milligan: Well, thank you, Molly.
Molly McMillin: Today we're focusing on flight safety specifically as it relates to Bombardier's upcoming annual Safety Standdown. It runs Nov. 11, 12 and 13, live in Wichita or accessible by webcast. Safety always comes first. And Chris, let's start with you. Bombardier has a packed three-day agenda for your event. I've been lucky enough to have attended quite a few of them, and I know you open it up to operators of any type of aircraft. There's no charge, and I certainly learn something every time. First, Chris, why do you do this and what is your mission here?
Chris Milligan: Thank you, Molly. We're excited about this year's event, as you know and as most of the community knows, but I'll restate is that this was started back in 1996, 29 years ago by a group of pilots in our Bombardier flight operations team, Learjet pilots I might add at that time, that basically wanted to stop the operations down for a couple days just to talk about human factors training, things that they're noticing ways to improve our operation. That's evolved over the years. It's gone from just that group of pilots to having it open for the entire industry to join all OEMs and not only just pilots, but also expanding beyond to maintenance to everybody that's around the flight from management to maintenance to flight attendants and so on and so forth. So we're excited to host a group of professionals, industry experts at our event in November, as you mentioned. And we know that it's going to be a really, really good exchange. And as always, we learn more than we think we are ever going to learn coming out of these events. So we're excited.
Molly McMillin: I know in the past I've done different things like how to use a fire extinguisher, which I didn't realize I didn't know how to use before or how to evacuate from a smoky cabin or how to get onto a raft and what things are in the raft and how you can use them. And a lot of just really practical safety tips and then presentations that just make you think about a lot of areas.
Chris Milligan: As you may remember from some of the events of the past, we have our main speakers on the main stage that occupy basically the agenda for the mornings and then after lunch we're able to have breakout sessions with specific topics for specific areas. So there's a little bit of something for everyone as they come to the event.
Molly McMillin: Yes, you have a really good lineup. Russ, let's move to you or should I call you Boss?
Russ Bartlett: Both of them work. I'll answer to each.
Molly McMillin: Your session, which by the way will be webcast is on leadership and life lessons from Blue Angel One, which I just learned that the number one designation goes to the commanding officer or the leader of the squadron, which I didn't know before.
Russ Bartlett: Yeah, you're right about that. I flew the number one jet as the flight leader. So my job was to fly maneuver profiles where the wingmen were generally flying formation. They're looking at me, I'm the only one looking out of the front of my airplane flying the profiles. They're literally looking to the right or left flying paint on the aircraft next to them.
Molly McMillin: You're the one that has all this stress right now. I'm sure they all have some stress, but
Russ Bartlett: There's plenty to go around.
Molly McMillin: You mentioned that being a member of the Blue Angels requires what you call Blue Angels caliber performance, and I know that's high stress. You call it high stress, high visibility, and a high risk environment as well. And that requires superior leadership, exceptional discipline. So what does that Blue Angels caliber performance and how does that relate to U.S. operators of aircraft or the maintainers or how do we live that in our lives? What is your take?
Russ Bartlett: Well, a couple of thoughts on that. I mean, first of all, my job as the boss was to, as I mentioned, to fly the profiles and to lead the team. The wingmen were much younger than I was, have a different job and that's flying formation. But I think all of us got to the team and realized that we were going to have to perform at a level that was far above anything that we'd ever had to produce before in terms of precision and consistency and predictability day after day. Because there's just no room for slop, there's no room for errors, there's no room for lapses in concentration. And that was the big difference. So when I say a Blue Angels caliber performance, that means you basically have to show up with your A game every single day and deliver because the folks are counting on you to bring it and to get it right.
And so that was the big adjustment I think, for every single one of us was being humble and demonstrating an absolute commitment to continuous improvement that goes all season long. When the presentation on Wednesday, I'll show you some pictures of the formation in March when the show season begins and then in November, and it is shocking the distance between the airplanes by the end of the season how tight it is compared with where we start. So it's a journey and it's the Blue Angels caliber performance. That's the end state. It's always bringing your A game and giving it your absolute best every single day.
Molly McMillin: What do you tell your colleagues, coworkers now to, how do you bring them along like that?
Russ Bartlett: Well, one of the things I mentioned in my introduction is that I got to fly the number one jet for two years, and it was the most challenging and also the most satisfying thing I have ever done. And the things I learned there changed me forever. So my discriminator though is that I've been out in aerospace and defense in corporate America for the last 15 years. And so I've taken some of the things I learned at the Blues and applied them in a corporate setting. So some of the things like the importance of a debrief is absolutely critical at the Blue Angels. And I realized that in corporate America, you're not going to debrief every meeting, every event, every everything. It's just not practical. But there are certain major events and important things that are worthy of a debrief. That was one of the most important things I think I brought to corporate America, is deciding when something is worthy of a timely and honest debrief. And the other one was just to seek perfection in all you do. And that's just a mindset. And we like to say we seek perfection in all we do, will we ever get there? Of course not. But our philosophy was if you seek perfection, you may achieve excellence, and that's a pretty good outcome.
Molly McMillin: Well, in aviation is one thing where people's lives really are part of what you think about and just so many different applications and subsets of all of that. So that'll be an interesting thing. Any other takeaways for us?
Russ Bartlett: I guess one of the big ones is never accepting no for an answer. And I like to say, if you master what you own, seek perfection in all you do, you earn the right to ask for the outrageous. So if you are the best at what you do, you get to ask for things. You have opportunities that others might not have. So that's worth the effort right there. Your teammates are dependent on you. So say it again, bring your A game every single day.
Molly McMillin: And Chris, what do you hope attendees take away at the end of the three days?
Chris Milligan: Well, it kind of goes along with our slogan, right? Learn, apply, share. And what you hope is that there are things that are applicable in your day-to-day job or those that actually impact your job, that there's things that you take away from each seminar, each discussion, each discussion you have during the break or at lunch with another person in the industry. And you take all of those things and you capture them, and then you learn to apply them in your day-to-day activity of work, whether it's being a pilot, whether it's a flight attendant, whether it's a maintenance technician, and then you try to share that across your organization. Our whole purpose is that safety is not contained to just one or two individuals in the organization. It's everybody from top to bottom, just like on our production floors that we use the same methodology and the same philosophies that we use to safety standdown where we bring the safety standdown on our production floors in our service centers, even when we're building and expanding into new facilities.
There's things that you take away from each one of these discussions over these course of these three days that you can take back to your organization and make your organization a safer place. So I'm excited about it. I mean, we've had the themes from moving safety forward to integrity and safety, to elevating your influence. And you can see a common theme that in this year's is that own the outcome, meaning to some of the things that Russ was talking about is that you own your outcome. Don't be passive. Safety is not a passive sport. It is something that needs to be active, elevate things that you recognize in your organization or ways to do things better. So we're really wanting everyone to take away at least a little bit of knowledge, something that they can take back and apply and share.
Russ Bartlett: Yeah. Chris, I'd like to pile on a little bit. See, I heard about this Bombardier safety standdown last year from some of the after action reports on LinkedIn, and that's when I reached out and tried to get on the roster for this year. Just the philosophy of it last year, they're saying nothing to buy, nothing to sell, what could be more pure and perfect for a safety standdown than that philosophy. And for me, it's kind of like coming home to Wichita. My first job outside the Navy after 25 years in the Navy was of course to go to Wichita, Kansas, where I told my wife, we're not dropping an anchor in Wichita, Kansas. We can get some experience for a couple years except we totally dropped an anchor in Wichita, Kansas, and we were there for eight years and it was great. So I'm looking forward to getting back into the environment with all the air capital people where it all happens out there. Good fun. Thank you for sponsoring this event. This is great.
Chris Milligan: Yeah, we're extremely blessed. This year is amazing because we've gotten more sponsors and active sponsors, and they all do it with, like you said, no recognition. And the other thing that we started last year was a fund to help emerging leaders or students to be able to attend the event. And so this year we raised enough money to sponsor three students and all their travel expenses to come and see and to start their journey in aerospace at safety standdown through the colleges that they're attending. So I'm glad that you mentioned that because we are very proud that this has always been a free event, and we have a lot of momentum to make sure it stays that way.
Molly McMillin: I think you have about 400 people live in attendance each year, right?
Chris Milligan: We do. This year we have 525 that are signed up, and as you mentioned, the facility's a little bit limited, but we're excited to have so much interest, and not only is there that many in the room, there's about 1,000 online from many different countries that participate indirectly, obviously over the web to be able to take away what they can from the event. We're excited. It'll be a very good event, a great lineup, and we're excited to see what people actually debrief us on at the end of the event because we sit down at the very end and we do a debrief and start outlining exactly what we want to do the following year. So I'm glad you brought that up, Russ.
Russ Bartlett: It's great, Chris. I'll spend a lot of time on that on Wednesday.
Molly McMillin: Great. Well, that's all the time we have today. I'm so sorry to run out of time. But guys, Russ and Chris, we really thank you for joining us and look forward to hearing more at the event. And thank you all for joining us, and I want to thank Jeremy Kariuki, our podcast producer for producing this.
Jeremy Kariuki: Thanks for listening to the BCA podcast by Aviation Week Network. This week's episode was produced by Jeremy Kariuki. If you enjoyed the show, don't forget to subscribe or follow us on your podcast app of choice. If you'd like to support us, please leave a rating wherever you listen. Thanks again and we'll see you next time.
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