A True Aerospace Industry Survivor
EDM’s business development manager, Richard Mullings says he’s still very much active in an aerospace and defence industry that has consumed his working life and thrown in many unexpected obstacles and career challenges along the way.
Originally from the Bournemouth area, my parents were supportive of me staying on at school past 16 and had an inkling I was interested in all things aircraft from a childhood of near continuous Airfix kit building – and as soon as I could, riding and disassembling motorcycles and tuning the cars of friends in the days when a screwdriver, feeler gauges and a light bulb was all you needed. Indeed, my mother had me tested and took me to visit a company that carried out psychometric testing and such to determine where my strengths lay. So, I knew my IQ and that I could do well in engineering.
After leaving school, it fell on my local library to provide contact addresses for companies that I thought might be interested in someone like me, so I started handwriting letters. Interviews followed and culminated in an offer to do an HND apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce, Derby as one of only ten selected from hundreds of applicants.
The following eight years saw the successful completion of my apprenticeship and a full-time position at Rolls-Royce with extensive international travel, a temporary posting in Los Angeles and interaction with supplying companies and airline customers. I must have caught someone’s attention as a job offer quickly materialised to leave Rolls-Royce and take on a business development/technical sales role with the Pall Corporation based in Portsmouth.
Then followed Meggitt, based in Farnborough, Slough and Hemel Hempstead with an associated house move to Buckingham. Redundancy followed six months after moving house, but I quickly found a new employer in Congleton-based Bird Precision Bellows with another house move to Sandbach. I spent the next seven years involved in leading the company’s earliest entry into the aerospace market with Daimler Chrysler Aerospace and Aerospatiale, now Airbus of course. I am especially proud of the titanium gimbal bellows that the then engineering manager, Jim Swaffield and I designed, and which remain on all Airbus types to this day.
I had been successful in taking Airbus work from several US-based competitors, one of which was Burbank, California-based SSP. Their attention was drawn to me somehow, and I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse to join the company, opening an office in the UK with frequent and prolonged periods working in the US. SSP is part of Senior Aerospace and my involvement led to an upper management position working back in the UK running European sales for all ten Senior Aerospace divisions. That was until September 11th 2001, and a second redundancy in the fallout that followed.
Again, cast adrift, it wasn’t long before Arrowhead Products based in Los Alamitos, California got in touch about running and developing their European business. I did this with further time being spent in the US and Italy where aerospace work was introduced into an Italian company that was owned by the same group. It was following this that I made the decision to start my own business at the age of 42 with the next 16-plus years spent successfully providing aerospace and defence technical and commercial assistance and representation for several US companies, until Covid hit. Then circumstances meant seeing my clients lose staff and dramatically shrink their operations. Once again it meant finding something else to do.
An uncertain world with its disastrous effect on the aerospace industry meant looking at all options, but at 59 I knew I wanted to continue being involved in an industry I loved. For the past four years I have been with EDM, a privately-owned business in Manchester specialising in commercial and defence training and simulation products. I’m focused on composite and machined parts together with test rigs and associated bespoke fabrications for customers that include Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems. The work is every bit as interesting as anything else I have done in the past 45 years and counting and I still have no intention of retiring just yet.
Credit | Aerospace Manufacturing
