PES talks to Rick Huntley, Director of Safety and Compliance, at Sentinel Aviation and discovers exactly how important safety is in this company. Two of the directors are ex-military and bring this added experience. He also explains that this relatively new industry is already entering a cut throat price war due to the number of players in the market.
PES: Welcome to PES Wind magazine. Thanks for talking with us. Would you like to begin by explaining a little about the background of your organisation and how you currently serve the wind industry?
Ricky Huntley: My two fellow directors established Sentinel Aviation in 2014 to exploit opportunities in the Unmanned Aviation Systems (UAS – drone) sector. One of the directors spent 18 years in the British Army before leaving to become a commercial pilot, flying corporate business jets, bringing a wealth of military and commercial aviation safety and risk management processes to the business. The other director founded and built a leading environmental contracting company, which required the highest levels of safety and risk assessment practices when working with the country’s largest energy providers on very high profile energy, nuclear power infrastructure, railway and motorway projects. Safety and risk reduction is an ethos embedded within the company.
I joined Sentinel Aviation as a director this summer following a period spent with one of the world’s leading aviation safety auditing & compliance companies. I felt that in such a fast-moving sector, I could offer a more effective service to my existing and future clients in a smaller business focused on the UK and EU rather than from a multi-national company with a global perspective where the UAS sector was only a small part of the business.
During the last few years I have operated UAS across the world and have accumulated in excess of 2500 hours flight time with large platforms in both the military and civilian spheres. During my military career I spent a significant amount of time developing operating systems and protocols. This experience has been augmented by similar operations in the civilian sector and it is this breadth of experience, combined with the range of skills of the other team members at Sentinel that made joining the company such an exciting opportunity.
