Show Notes
Two women who've collectively worked nearly every job aviation has to offer sit down to explain why Europe keeps writing the rulebook before anyone's allowed to fly.
Julie Garland, CEO of Avtrain and president of the Joint European Drone Associations, and Sarah Owen, VP for Europe Travel and Transportation at Sutherland and chair of the Aviation Club of the UK, join host Alex Brooker for the podcast's first in-person recording, held in London. The conversation covers unconventional career paths through aviation, the regulatory gap between Europe and the US/China on drones and AI, the persistent gender imbalance across pilots, engineers, and the drone sector, and where AI is (and isn't yet) delivering results in flight operations.
What You'll Learn Career sequencing: Julie moved through roughly ten-year blocks in engineering, flying, and law before founding a drone training company, treating each stage as a deliberate step rather than a single fixed path. Regulatory sequencing: Europe tends to regulate a technology before it has been operated at scale, while the US and China let operators fly first and shape rules from what they learn. Drone scalability barriers: Missing planning, noise, and airspace-access frameworks — not the drones themselves — are why some European drone delivery operators are concentrating expansion in the US, UK, and UAE instead. AI in flight operations: Tools like OptiFlight already use AI to rebalance horizontal and vertical thrust during climb, cutting fuel burn by roughly 5-6% on that phase of flight. Data silos as the real bottleneck: Airports, ground handlers, and airlines often each hold separate slices of operational data, and commercial incentives actively work against sharing it. Safety reporting culture in drones: Unlike commercial aviation's decades-old just culture of non-punitive incident reporting, the drone industry is only now being pushed toward mandated reporting that would let it prove real safety performance. Gender representation stalled: Female representation across pilots, air traffic controllers, and maintenance sits around 5%, with maintenance specifically closer to 2-2.5%, despite lower technical barriers to entry than in the past. Boeing versus Airbus as a cautionary tale: Slower, more conservative adoption of forward-looking technology is framed as a contributing factor in Boeing's more difficult recent stretch relative to Airbus.
Time-Stamped Highlights (00:00) Cold open and guest introductions (02:59) Origin stories: how Julie and Sarah each got into aviation (08:22) The last ten days: a week in the life of a drone regulator and an industry chair (10:13) Interviewing Willie Walsh and the Aviation Club dinner (12:55) Ireland's outsized role in global aircraft leasing (16:06) Career challenges: being a female apprentice on the hangar floor in the 1990s (19:10) Mentors who shaped each guest's path (28:51) Imposter syndrome, hesitancy, and why women apply for roles differently than men (36:09) The stalled numbers: gender statistics across pilots, ATC, and maintenance (38:09) Apprenticeship snobbery and the skills pipeline problem (42:52) Tech culture versus aviation culture on diversity enforcement (46:29) The future is already here: multimodal transport, drone deliveries, and the "three Ds" (52:55) AI in practice: OptiFlight, turnaround optimization, and the data-sharing problem (54:40) Regulate-then-operate versus operate-then-regulate: Europe vs the US and China (1:06:00) Building a just culture and mandated reporting in the drone industry (1:09:37) Closing advice for young people considering an aviation career
Guest bio Julie Garland is CEO of Avtrain, Europe's leading drone training and certification body, and president of the Joint European Drone Associations. She began her career as an aircraft maintenance engineer with Aer Lingus, went on to fly as a commercial captain and type-rating instructor, and later qualified as a barrister specializing in aviation law before
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