Arkaro Insights

What flying a plane taught me about leading people with Barry Eustance

• Mark Blackwell • Episode 26

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What if the skills needed to navigate a commercial aircraft through crisis could transform how we lead organizations? Barry Eustance's remarkable journey from cockpit to corporate leadership reveals powerful parallels between aviation safety and organizational excellence.

Barry's fascination with flying began at age five when a captain invited him onto the flight deck during his birthday flight. That moment sparked a lifelong passion culminating in a career that bridges aviation and leadership development. Through his experiences, Barry illuminates how the airline industry's evolution from authoritarian command structures to collaborative teamwork mirrors the transformation needed in modern organizations.

The podcast explores how tragic aviation accidents forced a fundamental rethinking of leadership approaches. The development of Crew Resource Management shifted focus from rigid hierarchies to team-based decision-making—a change that saved countless lives and offers profound lessons for business leaders. As Barry explains, "The people who make you a leader are the people that you lead and those are the people you serve." This philosophy underpins his PEOPLE framework for change leadership: People-centric leadership, Empowerment, Optimizing the organization, Purpose-driven vision, Learning, and Embedding change.

Perhaps most fascinating is Barry's discussion of FIPTDODAR, an aviation emergency protocol that translates seamlessly to business crisis management. When facing critical situations, the first imperative remains "fly the airplane"—a powerful reminder that amid problem-solving, core operations must continue. This structured approach prevents the dangerous fixation on specific issues while neglecting fundamental responsibilities.

As organizations increasingly integrate artificial intelligence, Barry offers balanced perspective on technology's potential and limitations. While acknowledging AI's value in handling routine tasks, he emphasizes the irreplaceable human elements of leadership: experience, intuition, and ethical judgment. "AI supports humans, not the other way around," he reminds us, highlighting that meaningful leadership remains fundamentally about people.

Join us for this illuminating conversation that will transform how you think about leadership, decision-making under pressure, and creating environments where teams truly thrive. What aviation-inspired principles might elevate your leadership approach?

See more here What Flying a Plane Taught Me About Collaborative Leadership

Send your thoughts to Arkaro

Mark Blackwell:

Hello listeners, how are you so today? Welcome to Arkaro Insights, and we've got the great pleasure of introducing you to Barry Eustance. Barry's initial part of his career was that we'll learn much more today versus an airline pilot and they then transitioned into leadership and we're going to explore the lessons learned from being an airline pilot and to learning about leadership and organisation development. Barry, maybe you can just take a step back and recount that story and tell us how did you get there and why was the interest?

Barry Eustance:

What? Flying? Yeah, no, the flying is the classic. On my fifth birthday in 1962, I flew back from Bahrain on a comet and, because it's my birthday, they took me out to the flight deck and I was a member of the junior jet club because we used to. We lived in Bahrain, so we did a lot of transiting to and from London and as a card carrying member of the junior jet club, uh, as they were filling out my logbook, um for the, the visit to the flight deck, uh, the. The captain said what would you like to be? And I looked up and without a blink, said I want to be an airline pilot, sir, and that was it.

Barry Eustance:

So age five and then everything I did from that point on was pretty well focused towards achieving.

Barry Eustance:

Now I can't remember whether it's an objective, a strategy, a goal or a name, but whatever the case is what I did and everything I did.

Barry Eustance:

I got my medicals done, I joined the air cadets, I got my pilot's license through a flying scholarship when I was 17. I joined the university air squadron and thereafter it kind of rolled out not quite as planned, but we can come on to that and so I got involved because there was a recession in the industry at the time and the College of Air Training at Hamble. So I went to London University and did electronics, with physics and French none of which I understood, but I was on the London University air squadron at the time and then the College of Air Training, hamble the organization that I'd had my sights on for all those years was not taking students any more intake, and in fact it was a great recession. In fact, the College of Air Training subsequently closed, and so I kind of got into the business side of aviation and so I then started to see both the the leadership management side and the flying. So that's, that's a bit of background.

Mark Blackwell:

Got it. Now it's becoming a little bit clearer how then you transitioned onwards later on? Yeah, but so tell me, I mean, I traditionally think of you know, maybe at the same age as five, as as you were, and I first saw an airline pilot as someone walking up the steps with a briefcase and an epaulette, looking a bit almost like a military commander and sort of very fierce and strong, and maybe that set my mind. But you think one may be forgiven to thinking of airline pilots as being in a sort of command and control position where the epaulettes give respect, and it's a little bit sort of old-fashioned management, isn't it, interestingly a lot of the um, a lot of the culture in the airline industry post the second world war.

Barry Eustance:

So in the early 60s and 70s, was exactly that. There was a very, what they called, very steep cross cockpit authority gradient, easy for you to say, and it was basically, you know, you were the boy in the right-hand seat and this was an Atlantic baron who had flown zillions of hours and should not be challenged. And then the Papa Indri incident occurred, where the captain, stan Keyes, was quite an authoritarian and it all went badly wrong and they'd had a big argument in the crew room. He was wound up, he was, say, very authoritarian, and the accident report reported this. This is not my supposition. And so there was the accident just at Staines.

Barry Eustance:

The airplane crashed, it was a Trident, and people started to think about maybe we're not doing this correctly and some subsequent accidents in the airline industry where, again, too strong an authority figure on board the flight. The airplane created some pretty serious incidents, like the Tenerife North accident with the two jumbos, and it was a very. It was a very. It was. Do you know? Now I think about it, mark. It was very similar to the Formula One experience where, you know, there's a period where a lot of people you know there are a lot of accidents and the industry was learning very rapidly and people like Sid Watkins in Formula One was starting to say we need to change things. And in the airline industry, we started to concentrate on or focus on what was called we now call, or were then called, soft skills, and it became called crew resource management.

Barry Eustance:

So how do you get the best out of your crew as a team? And, as you and I are probably agreed upon, there are lots of different management styles. I think the oxford review, david wilkinson, came up with 162. Yes, and different cited management in peer-reviewed documents. And so which one is the correct one? And the answer to the question is by the time you boil it down, you've got a thing that you need to think about, and that is that you are ultimately it's not positional point one. Having epaulets doesn't make a blind bit of difference to your position as leadership, because the people who make you a leader are the people that you lead and those are the people you serve. And so once you make that mind shift and that cultural shift, everything flows differently, the whole thing is rewired and suddenly you have a team working together, not an authoritarian dictator type situation where people do as they're told. You have people actually agreeing the best course of action and you'll probably get a better outcome.

Mark Blackwell:

So I'm fascinated. How did the industry respond? How did the old guard take on this idea of having to change their approach? How long did it take?

Barry Eustance:

well, it's interesting, it's it's really interesting because the, the, the people who resisted it the most, were the people who needed it the most. So you'd get the you, so you'd be in a room full of people which would be potentially cabin crew and pilots, and the people who went I don't need this, this is absolute rubbish. Well, the people who went sorry, but I think you may find that a quick look in the mirror and a bit of personal introspection would align you with some alternative thinking. So it wasn't easy by any means, but any cultural change requires essentially a small group of people doing something different and showing the success of that and showing how it works, empirically and gradually, that cultural change takes hold. And that's what happened.

Barry Eustance:

We started to have fewer accidents, uh, we. We had better coordination between the cabin and the flight deck, uh, and in the incidents that I've had, fortunately very few, but, but some of them could have been different, with a different mindset. The team it was large, was consulted, was massively supportive and actually, at the end of it all, the captain, which is where I was sitting, has the ultimate responsibility for the decision. Which way are we going to play this? But based upon a huge knowledge base drawn from right across the ecosystem, the environment, the organisation.

Mark Blackwell:

Fascinating and it's very interesting you said it without any prompting or pre-discussion from me about how a small group creates change, Because one of the things that's typically popular thought to be popular in change is that the ceo should stand up in some 2000s and announce a great change initiative where more and more people think that maybe that creates as many enemies to change as it does to support us to change and that change is best managed by having a small group of people demonstrating that it works and creating a catalyst for that. If you remember, there was a really viral YouTube video a year or so ago about someone dancing at a festival.

Mark Blackwell:

It's the same sort of idea that change best happens organically, as if it were not.

Barry Eustance:

Yeah, well, you and I are both great fans of Julie Hodges and Hilary Scarlett's people centric approach to change, change leadership and change management. And there is a difference between change leadership and change management. And the basically the, the the domain of leaders is the future. Their job is essentially change. I mean, that's what leaders are brought in to do. It's a continuous process of change and it's coming at us ever more rapidly, particularly, as we discussed in our previous podcast, ai is making the whole process of decision-making a more rapid process and it's up to us to ensure that that decision making is a quality process and we mustn't lose, whatever happens, if we say nothing else in this podcast, we have to retain critical thinking. So if your first response is to go to chat GPT and take the first answer it takes, ask it a second time and a third time and a fourth time. You'll find it'll change its mind quite a lot, because it hallucinates between 10 and 15% of the time. I mean complete hallucination, and so the element of change that seems to be empirically the thing that impedes change is lack of buy-in. You have this great program and then nobody wants to come because you haven't got the buy-in.

Barry Eustance:

And, as we've discussed, mark, the people-centric element of change. We've built our own framework, which we, being a pilot. So it's simple messaging. Listen, here's the deal with with airplanes. You've got a lot of information coming at you and that the, the ergonomics of an airplane are you. You condense that into the simplest, uh, the, the simplest for five instruments that condense all that information, even in a modern airliner, and you put it. You put it in the most ergonomic place so that it's easy for the pilot to actually discern the wheat from the chaff. And so simple messaging. The tennis ball analogy whereas if I throw six tennis balls at you, you may catch two, if I throw two, you'll probably catch two. So throw the two balls, not the other four that are irrelevant. The two balls, not the other four that are irrelevant. So, from the perspective of simple messaging, we created a framework which is called PEOPLE, the People Change, leadership and Management Framework, and it's all the stuff that resonates.

Barry Eustance:

It's about people-centric leadership. So that's the P. E stands for empowerment, that's empowering the people who are going to perform the change. That means the entire organization. O is to optimize the organization. There's no point in having a great idea if you've got your systems, processes and structures that impede the change. That's just going to trip it up. Then you've got to have once you've set all that up. So now you're kind of ready to go. You've got the P for the purpose-driven vision, because without a purpose-driven vision and it's not about the P&L folks, it's about a vision that people can hook onto it grabs them emotionally. We're talking here now about people-centric leadership, organization as a whole, and a significant proportion of them are involved in the change, not a, not a select few, as uh cotter describes the, the old method of doing it, where a select few people go into a huddle and emerge with the great new plan, the great plan the great plan and then send it by email to everybody and they go what are you kidding?

Barry Eustance:

throw it out so you have the purpose driven vision that people can buy into. Then l is for learning, because there's no. You've got to be able to measure, build, learn, measure, pivot, and then you've got to embed it. And so the idea is that, if nothing, people walk away with the very simple concept that it's about people. Change is about people, leadership is about people absolutely so interesting.

Mark Blackwell:

when using acronyms, I think you know I used to be a bit cynical about them, but more and more I find them more and more useful in my life because I think you've really got to help understand where you are and what to do. So maybe not from civil aviation, but one of the things that's becoming very popular in management talk is something developed in military aviation by Colonel John Boyd called the OODA loop Observe Orient, decide Act. Did you have anything like that found useful in the civil aviation world?

Barry Eustance:

Well, I'm glad you pointed out that pilots are obsessed with acronyms. Because we are, and I wasn't even aware of it. And because we do, because there are a lot of long words in aviation that you could never remember, like VOR, which is VHF Omni Radio Range. Why would you ever say VHF Omni Radio Range, and yes, we did? The answer to your question is yes, we did. Vhs Omni radio range, and yes, we did. The answer to your question is yes, we did, because there are certain key elements that you need to hook to in the environment.

Barry Eustance:

So let's assume you're cruising along in an orderly fashion day during your your pre-flight uh rest period, looking at um at fly fishing rods, and then you walk back and you have some pre-flight rest and you're flying and it's a lovely flight back to london to crew, and then you notice you've got a fuel leak and then you notice you're mid-atlantic. I say you don't notice you're mid-atlantic, you know you're mid-atlantic, but you observe what appears to be a fuel leak, um, which is quite a serious thing in an airplane that weighs 368 tons, has got 308 passengers and 13 crew on board and you're mid-Atlantic. So what do you do next In order to standardize? And that's why we have the acronyms in the airline industry, because A you've got to remember a lot of stuff quickly and there are very few checklist items that are memory items, but some are. And and this actually wasn't a memory item per se, we used to write it down um, because it's quite a long one, and it was called FIPTIDODAR, and the.

Barry Eustance:

The first important thing and this relates, before you switch off intellectually, dear listener and viewer this relates specifically and particularly to the business and organization environment. Because in the airplane, so you're steaming along and you've got to keep flying the airplane You've got to focus on flying the airplane. So the first thing is the first, f is fly the airplane, and then I is interrogate the problem and P is plan. In other words, you contain the issue but keep flying the airplane. And an example of when that didn't happen and Mark and I were discussing this before we started recording was that there was a very famous accident in the Everglades where there was a landing gear. Light wasn't working, so they went to change the bulb and we're so focused on changing the bulb. They flew into the Everglades on the approach and it was a very serious accident. So you've got to fly the aeroplane, you interrogate and you plan. So that's the FIP bit.

Mark Blackwell:

Just thinking about it. Yeah, so it's one of the big emergencies I had in a commercial world was working for a company that had the world's best farm virucidal disinfectant, which happened to be based in the uk, and I happened to be working for them in 2001 when we had the foot and mouth outbreak oh yeah yeah.

Mark Blackwell:

So all of a sudden the whole nature of our business changed overnight. But fortunately, within a few hours there are some wise heads in the room who said yes, there's a lot to be done, but keep serving our existing customers first keep flying the airplane, because that meant that actually created the greatest long-term value for the business, despite the enormous commercial opportunity that we faced.

Barry Eustance:

Um so, and again it's it's very relevant in the commercial world yeah, and we, we should and must talk about long-term value and long-term stakeholder value.

Barry Eustance:

Um so, for the fact no, not at all, because I wrote it down. I've written this down. So FIP, f-i-p, fip, right, t-d-o-d-a. T is for time. How long have you got? It doesn't matter whether you're flying an airplane or whether you're running a company In Mark's case, foot and mouth.

Barry Eustance:

How long have we got? How much cash have we got at the bank? How many customers have? And we've got, how long we got to run this plan, um, and then, uh, the d, t, d, diagnose, so diagnose the problem, actually take the time. Now you're flying the airplane, you've interrogated the initial problem, you've got an initial plan. You've now got to determine the time. You're diagnosing it. And then you, you have the next bit, which is o, which is options, and so you look at what your options are based upon. Now your more detailed diagnosis, um, and, and then you decide what you're going to do and then you assign roles.

Barry Eustance:

In our case, we would have talked to air traffic. We would have talked to our, our engineering team. We would have talked to our crew. We would have talked to our engineering team. We would have talked to our crew. We would have talked to our passengers. All the stakeholders you can talk to are a great source of inspiration and innovation and then, having assigned that, you review your plan and continue reviewing your plan, because no plan survives the first encounter with the enemy.

Barry Eustance:

Mark and I had a little debate about plan and strategy before, but we won't go there. So FIPTIDODARs it was the acronym we used to give us a structured but simple process that would save lives, basically. And that's exactly what we did in Mid-Atlantic and we landed uneventfully at heathrow and our passengers didn't even miss the croissant course for breakfast they had. We actually shut an engine down. In the event there's a leak from a fuel tank, we shut an engine down. We looked at our options on the way into london, which was shannon, so we could dive in shannon or dublin and then cardiff and then Bryce Norton and so forth. But it was a four-engine airplane and we just carried on and we continued that review, making sure we did have the correct fuel figure for landing at Heathrow and we landed uneventfully.

Mark Blackwell:

Brilliant. There are great analogies to that, to the UDL loop into business. It was fascinating. Congratulations, I mean, as I was listening to you, I mean I was trying to think one of the sort of themes here establish options. So your diagnosis. It's all too easy to believe that you have the correct diagnosis. What you've got is probably a good hypothesis is what's wrong? Based upon limited information? Maybe you have more accurate controls in an aeropl airplane than you do sensors in the business world. But you know, I'm sure you've got had times when you've been given duff information in the air.

Barry Eustance:

Well, actually that's that fuel leak we had was a classic case where, um you could be, if you remember the trans air, in a very similar they're in a 330, an Airbus 330, which is a twin engine airplane did a dead stick landing into the Azores because they ran out of fuel because of the sensing systems on the airplane. And we did it two ways we calculated the amount of fuel we had on board, but then we calculated the amount of fuel we've used and added it to our starting fuel calculation. And this was just a calculator and a pen. So you know how much does the thing say we've used and add that to the starting fuel. Does that equal what it's telling us the fuel is on board? And that's what I identified in our fuel leak case and it's what wasn't identified in the Transair case. And so an aeroplane can give you a lot of information, sometimes too much, and it's having the key metrics measure what matters not everything.

Mark Blackwell:

Yes, absolutely. We can talk about that another day easily.

Barry Eustance:

If you measure everything, nothing gets done, correct yeah, so measure what matters, and then what gets measured gets done.

Mark Blackwell:

But then have choices so that if you realise that your initial data wasn't quite as you thought it was, you've already given yourself another options to think through to adapt quickly in the cycle. Maybe I think that's a little bit of the OODA loop and what you're saying is given yourself another options to think through to adapt quickly in the cycle, and maybe I think that's a little bit of the oodle loop and what you're saying is yeah, it's well it's the review.

Barry Eustance:

The review element of 50 todar is is exactly that. You know you're doing a gross error check every in every few minutes and in fact, you know it goes along the same lines as Eric Ries' build measure, learn, pivot or learn, as Nick Himovitz said learn, build measure, learn, pivot and repeat for startups, because you can absolutely guarantee that what you think your startup is going to be doing is not going to be doing in six months or 12 months' time, because the market will tell you where you've got to move and pivot to, and it's. You've got to be agile and adaptive.

Mark Blackwell:

Indeed. Well, we can do another subject about. You know how large corporations still believe that around September they can predict the next 12 months, and they're not going to review that until 12 months later.

Barry Eustance:

Cue another can of worms but it.

Barry Eustance:

But it still seems that they can talk I mean look, we, we've, we've moved a long way since the 50s and and look, here's a great analogy that I think works. And mark, you're so bang on the numbers there. I think it's, it's um, right at the end of every quarter, the finance department would run the, the uh, or end of month, uh would run the and, and then they'd eventually close it and then you'd get onto it and the end of the year is another. There's another sort of void period where people were doing and catching up and closing things off.

Barry Eustance:

Now you have something like QuickBooks and it's done constantly, it's open all the time, it's working all the time. You know where you are constantly, you have that ability, and thus it is with strategy. I mean know where you are constantly, you have that ability, and thus it is with strategy. I mean strategy basically is you know, having worked your strategy, you've got to make sure it is working and you have every ability to do that and every ability to tweak it. I mean Pete Compo's emergent approach to strategy and the processes that Pete espouses in his book are fantastic and it is about a living, breathing. Go and live your strategy.

Mark Blackwell:

I hear him say so what are the next steps? Perhaps that in aviation that we should be looking out for that might be, or the trends in aviation that might inform this.

Barry Eustance:

Interesting A left field question yeah, no, no, no, it's not really. I mean, is AI going to take a hold in aviation? I think AI has got a place everywhere. I mean, it is a tool like every other tool and provided it's moderated and regulated it's moderated and regulated and I'll come on to the question of regulation but provided it is moderated and used sensibly, with critical thinking, it can be a huge game changer for organizations, including the airline industry, provided you accept that currently it's got a pool of data and it hallucinates and it makes a mistake 15% of the time at least, and those can be gross errors. I mean serious errors, like it's just made stuff up.

Barry Eustance:

And when Mark and I did a podcast recently, I posed this question Would you go to Heathrow Airport, jump in an airplane and fly to Hong Kong if the airplane was flown and operated only by AI? And if you would please write to us in the comments below. And if you wouldn't join me? Because I wouldn't and the reason I wouldn't is because I know I suffer from probably about a 2% error rate and my colleague does and there are two of us cross-checking the whole time and that we we have a shared destiny with the people on board the airplane. So we have that other human element of motivation and we have the human intuition and the um, the, the, also the, the capability of brain synchronicity, and, for those of you who don't know about that, hilary Scarlett's third edition of Neuroscience for Organizational Change and will perhaps come onto the spaces model as it relates to leadership. So you have all of that human stuff and go and ask your GPT what you as a human can do that AI can't, and you'll be quite surprised. It comes up with quite an honest assessment of where the human strengths are.

Barry Eustance:

And so in the aviation industry I see that there will be increasing within systems. There will be AI, clearly, which is basically machine learning. And for those of us who think this is new, it's not that new really. Machine learning has been going on for a very long time. But in the airline industry, are we likely to see single pilot operations? Well, certainly that is something that they're talking about already. So single pilot with an observer.

Barry Eustance:

The issues I have with that is that pilot illness. You go to somewhere, like I don't know, down route, long haul, don't be geographically specific, and you come back with a stomach bug or something you've picked up down route, which happens a lot If you've got a crew of 13 or 14 and you go down route to a destination. They've drunk the wrong water or they've had some dodgy food or whatever and they feel sick on board the airplane. You know, we've had pilots who are literally incapacitated for whatever reason, and it can range from heart attack to food poisoning, food poisoning being another significant element. Now you can say, well, ai is going to alleviate that. But then you've got the other bit what's hidden in the machine learning that you don't know about? And how are you going to moderate that when you've got none for the airplane? So I think there's some big practical and ethical questions to be asked there.

Mark Blackwell:

But I know I was fascinated by the discussion we had last time because it did force me to think of the tangible and the intangible reasons, about what we would or wouldn't accept AI in the workplace. Obviously, having the pilot on board is very important. So then I contrasted that to myself about air traffic control. So, intuitively, I'm much more comfortable about having air traffic control a lot, having a bigger role in AI, having a bigger role in AI, having a bigger role in air traffic control, than being a pilot on the plane. I just wondered.

Barry Eustance:

Yeah, I think again, the thing with air traffic control is right. So their primary function is safety and separation, or safety through separation of aircraft, separation or safety through separation of aircraft. Um, and there there is. Ai can undoubtedly get there fast, it can, it can look, it can be spotting something coming in from another sector that you haven't even seen, because historically aircraft are handed from sector to sector. So controller on your left may have a group of airplanes that you don't know about, but they're coming into your sector soon and they transfer them, and they used to transfer them with paper slips and now they transfer them electronically.

Barry Eustance:

But what is very interesting is that when you're talking to air traffic, as I've done, in multiple jurisdictions with multiple levels of English and multiple levels of non-English, I mean people. For example, in France there's a lot of air traffic is conducted in French and also in China there's a lot of the air traffic is conducted in French and the idea is it should be English, because then everybody's speaking in. That was the common language and it's all about traffic avoidance. But air traffic can pick up nuances and you can pick up nuances from air traffic that I suspect ai might have difficulty uh, doing. Um, and they're human things where you just or the air travel, you know pick something up, or we'll sense something, or experience will tell them, and they'll be and, and so it's a very much a human-based operation. It's it, we, air traffic, call us, um, called pilots, blip, uh, blip drivers, we're, we're, um, we are the blip, sorry, the air traffic drive and and so, um, but there is an interaction and there can be a very human, human activity. Is is, I think, very valid and, let's face it, mark you and I are big ai users, um, but it doesn't stop us picking up the telephone and talking to people and it doesn't stop us having a cup of coffee with people and discussing things that we think are important, because actually, some of the ai, the ai, can take away some of the drudge tasks that allow us to focus on on rain making.

Barry Eustance:

Um, so do I think, for example, that ai is going to enable urban air mobility in significant numbers. I think technically it can. I think the question is that what is, what is the safety record of that ecosystem? What is the capability of the equipment in that system? For example, currently you're seeing a lot of four, four seat, or limited numbers of seated um urban air mobility vehicles with lots of propellers. Here's the secret with lots of propellers and here's the secret with lots of propellers.

Barry Eustance:

And one of the reasons I like jets is that if, when you've got lots of propellers turning around and a bird flies into them, you've got a busted propeller, and a busted propeller means you've got a very significant balance issue going through the system. And now you've got a lot of energy on one side and the whole spinning forces thing becomes a bit horrendous. But also the the small matter of icing. On the eastern seaboard of the united states for a lot of the year you've got very severe icing from ground, in fact below ground level, upwards to a very high level, and that is the the point at which, um, basically ice will turn your your finely crafted um, computer generated uh, cad, cam, um computed um laminar flow wing into a brick. Yes, a very efficient brick with all the aerodynamics of a brick.

Barry Eustance:

And so if you've got, if you've got multiple propellers zipping around on an electric airplane with a limited range because of the battery technology at the moment and you pick up icing, you've just created a brick electric de-icing or bleed air de-icing, which the urban air mobility vehicles at the moment have. If you're going to do it electrically, which is certainly feasible, you're then pulling battery power out. If you're doing it pneumatically, well, you haven't got any bleed system air. You've got nothing spinning around, no jet engine spinning out, so bleed air isn't an option.

Barry Eustance:

And I saw one very large organization it's a 99-page document and at the very back end it referred to hydrophobic fluids. Until the thing got through the icing layer and we went. Well, that's really interesting. The icing layer goes up to about 10,000 to 20,000 feet. It's never going to get out of it, in, in on the eastern seaboard, and. And so how is that going to work? And and then you've got the fact that you've got the the air traffic management issue of all of these uavs flying around, under whose control question mark. And I'll leave that question open to those who know better and who've got bigger brains than me to work out, but I know where I sit on it right now.

Mark Blackwell:

That's Barry. Thank you very much. I mean, I think, just wrapping up from that, what I'm hearing is expertise certainly matters and making connections from one area to another, and I loved the story about the value of air traffic controllers and their weak signal sensing. I think that's very important in business and and that you know thinking about the whole debate about do we need humans? Yes, you're right, tasks can be resolved, but there's a lot of issues that come from experience, from being able to connect different ideas together that can keep humans in work for a while yet.

Barry Eustance:

thank you very much, yeah great, great pleasure, mark, and it is just to conclude. It is actually really important to remember that AI supports humans, not the other way around, and so humans have a hugely important element of every aspect of business, because, ultimately, we're dealing with people.

Mark Blackwell:

Right on. Thank you very much, barry. Good to talk to you this morning. Hope again we can talk again soon.

Barry Eustance:

Bye, bye. Thank you, mark, it's been a great pleasure. Bye, bye, cheers, bye.

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