Editor’s note: Made in Tarrant is an occasional Q&A series on small businesses started in Tarrant County. Submit your business here.
Peter Henrikson admits aviation is not just a profession, but a vocation as well.
The former F-16 pilot for the U.S. Air Force, who flies for fun on the weekend, was expecting to be an aviation consultant following his 16-year military career and presented a plan to improve aviation safety to a potential client.
He expected to advise the client on the project as they built out the program. They had a different response instead.
“They said, ‘Sounds great. Now go build it.’ So, that’s what I did,” Henrikson said.
Launched in 2015, originally as Truth Data Insights, the recently rebranded Brazos Safety Systems is a leader in aviation safety technology, specializing in data-driven insights and analytics all aimed at enhancing flight safety.
The company provides market leading flight data monitoring and flight operations quality assurance solutions for rotorcraft and fixed-wing operators worldwide.
Brazos Safety serves aircraft operators across sectors including emergency medical rescue, oil and gas, VIP, logistics, law enforcement and executive travel. The company supports more than 300 aircraft and analyzes data from over 200,000 flights.
Business editor Bob Francis spoke with Henrikson about the company and its work.
Contact information:
Website: brazossafety.com
Phone: 682-214-2057
Email: info@brazossafety.com
Address: 600 W. Sixth St., Suite 402, Fort Worth
This interview has been edited for length, grammar and clarity.
Bob Francis: Could you tell me about your business and how it got started?
Peter Henrikson: It started in 2015 basically as a consulting venture. I was getting out of the military and I had started working in the aerospace industry at Airbus Helicopters in Grand Prairie. A lot of what I took for granted, whether it’s military or commercial aviation, hadn’t made its way down to the helicopter industry yet. So I took that experience that I had of knowing who’s who in the industry to bring some of these safety capabilities from — whether it was from a military perspective or from a commercial aviation fixed-wing perspective — and bring it into the helicopter market.
Francis: And what are some of those? What are some of those things that fixed-wing helicopters don’t have?
Henrikson: One of the biggest things you’ll hear is the term flight data monitoring, or sometimes it’s focal flight operations, quality assurance.
Think about your automobile. If you had a 1980-something car, there probably weren’t any computers in it.
Nowadays, your car can tell you how many times you stop at a Starbucks on the way into the office.
So what we’re trying to do is bring that capability into the helicopter industry. We do that by showing you what happened on that last flight and then, big picture, what are the trends that are occurring, whether it’s with the operator or the industry as a whole.
The airlines have been doing this since the 1980s. But, at the time, these big heavy data recorders, think giant heavy equipment that would be added into an airliner. That was prohibitive for the helicopter industry.
Now, if you go to buy a new aircraft from Bell or Airbus tomorrow, it’s already recording all that data. But how do you make heads or tails out of it? That was our big push.
Francis: So how did you build the company?
Henrikson: The first employee of the company was Matt Hilton, and he was a data analyst that worked with us and was pretty instrumental in setting up the business. Very unexpectedly, Matt passed away in January of 2020.
At that point we brought in more folks. I’m not a data analyst. Matt could look at ones and zeros and trends and charts and such and make sense of it. I had the ability to go out and know who to talk to in the industry, to build partnerships with Bell, the FAA and things like that. That’s how it all started.
Francis: How did the business grow?
Henrikson: Over the years we added a few folks. One is in the Netherlands. His favorite restaurant in the world is Reata from his time when he did an internship at Lockheed.
One point that’s worth mentioning, for years, we didn’t have a centralized office. It was folks working around the globe, the Netherlands, the U.K., Australia, Oregon, Louisiana and other places.
Aviation people are very committed to safety and so you get a lot of people who want to do this work, even if it’s not full time.
Francis: Now you have this investment from Los Angeles-based Altaline Capital Management, a private equity firm focused on partnering with lower-middle market companies in the technology, business services and financial services spaces. How did that come about and what will that do for the company?
Henrikson: The idea is to kind of grow the business to be able to achieve a lot of the things that we hadn’t been able to do as just kind of a bootstrap startup.
As a small company, a lot of times you fill a niche that a big company can’t. They’re just not agile enough to do it.
So if you bought a helicopter and you went to GE — that’s a very big player in the data monitoring space — they wouldn’t have been able to help you. They didn’t even have the tools and the ability to service a helicopter operator.
That’s how we kind of made our niche.
But the hard thing for small businesses is how do you continue that in a way that is meaningful to your customers and especially the team.
It was important for me to find the right capital. With Altaline’s support and strategic guidance, we are well positioned to accelerate innovation, enhance our solutions, and deliver even greater value to our customers as we continue our mission to improve flight safety worldwide.
Bob Francis is business editor for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at bob.francis@fortworthreport.org.At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.
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Great Job Bob Francis & the Team @ Fort Worth Report Source link for sharing this story.
