AERALIS founder and CEO, Tristan Crawford, was the special guest on Siemens’ ‘Industry Forward Podcast’ recently.

In an insightful conversation with Dale Tutt, Vice President of Industry Strategy at Siemens Digital Industries Software, Tristan explained the origins of the AERALIS concept, and how that drives the company’s mindset and culture to deliver. This enables ground-breaking digital innovation, and an unprecedented level of flexibility, availability and value for money for the RAF, global defence partner nations and commercial industry partners.

Tristan commented: “…it is designed so that even private companies – commercial companies, can operate this hardware and this software on behalf of the military customer. Because in that way, private industry and commercial industry is actually motivated and incentivised to acquire and finance this equipment and operate at a very high level of availability, using a contract basis which is incentivised to deliver outputs and outcomes…

This is a mindset and an architecture which is needed to really transform defence aviation.

“Our mindset – our culture – is about delivering that shift in mentality and architecture, and air system thinking – so that wherever the industry needs to go, be it in Europe, the US, the UK, Asia – this is what friendly forces are going to need to have.”

It’s a mindset shared by US Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen. David W. Alvin, who commented about USAF’s shift in focus away from long-term platforms at Farnborough in July: “It’s the systems that make the difference. So privileging design rather than very expensive hardware that is so expensive you can’t afford enough of them to be able to use, I think is one of the areas that we’re pursuing in several of the capabilities we’re developing…If you can fit that technology into the current form factor because it’s modular, great..” Read our article on the defence conference here.

Listen to both parts of the podcast here:

Part 1

Part 2

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