Twenty years in military aviation shaped how I think about risk, crews, and why this mission matters.

I spent almost twenty years in Air Force Special Operations Command. I started as a C-130 crew chief and eventually became a Combat Aviation Advisor with the 6th Special Operations Squadron.

Aviation was a constant throughout it all.

As a crew chief, one of the most important parts of my job was pretty simple: give the aircrew the safest aircraft possible when they walked out to fly. You inspect it, maintain it, troubleshoot it, and do everything you can to make sure that when the crew takes the airplane from you, you've done your part to get them home safely.

But once the airplane leaves, a lot can happen.

I've known several people throughout my military career who died in aviation-related mishaps. None were among my closest friends, but that doesn't make those losses insignificant. When you spend your career around military aviation, you also spend a lot of time around the reality that what we do can be unforgiving.

I saw that from another perspective later as a Combat Aviation Advisor.

Our teams operated in places where missions could be complicated, high-risk, and sometimes hostile. We weren't always sitting in a nice operations center with perfect information. Sometimes you were monitoring aircraft from the ground, trying to understand what was happening with limited situational awareness. Sometimes you were the person who might have to help coordinate a response or launch a Quick Reaction Force if something went wrong.

In those situations, information matters.

Knowing where an aircraft is is useful. Understanding what is happening inside that aircraft, what the crew is dealing with, and where the risk is starting to build is something entirely different.

That's the lens I had when I first heard about Beacon AI.

I met Matt Cox and heard his vision for Beacon in 2021, while I was still on active duty. The idea wasn't AI for the sake of saying we were using AI. The vision was to build a system that could reduce pilot workload, improve situational awareness, recognize problems developing in flight, and help crews make better decisions when the margin for error starts getting small.

That clicked for me almost immediately.

I could see situations from my own career where something like that would have mattered. I could see the value to the crew in the airplane, but I could also see the value to the people on the ground trying to support them.

More importantly, I could see the possibility that a system like this might someday save somebody's friend, family member or coworker.

That is ultimately why the mission stuck with me.

The Mission Was Still There

A lot changes at a startup in five years.

What stood out when I reconnected with Beacon was what hadn't changed.

The vision Matt described to me in 2021 is still the vision the company is executing against today.

That matters to me.

There are a lot of directions a company can go when money, customers, contracts, and new opportunities start showing up. Beacon has stayed focused on the original problem: making aviation safer and helping pilots operate better.

We are building AI systems for the flight deck. Murdock is our AI pilot assistant, and Lighthouse provides the data and infrastructure around it. There is a lot of technology underneath those products, but the reason I care about them isn't really the technology.

It's the outcome.

Can we reduce workload at the moment a pilot is getting task-saturated?

Can we help recognize that something isn't right before the situation gets worse?

Can we give a crew better information when they need to make a decision?

Can we give people supporting that aircraft better situational awareness when things start going sideways?

And ultimately, can any of that prevent the next mishap?

Those are problems worth working on.

Why Beacon

The mission was the biggest reason I joined, but the way Beacon operates mattered too.

After twenty years in government, I was ready for less bureaucracy.

I spent a big part of my military career on small, high-performing teams where people were expected to figure things out and get the mission done. As a Combat Aviation Advisor, there often wasn't a giant organization standing behind you solving every problem. You had a small team, a mission, and a lot of things that weren't going to go according to plan.

I loved that environment.

A small startup has more in common with that than I would have expected.

My title at Beacon is Program Manager, but that doesn't tell you much about what I actually do. I've worked on aircraft, helped build hardware, supported customer engagements, built parts, worked on our mobile simulator, managed defense programs, handled security responsibilities, and solved whatever other problem happened to be in front of us that day.

That isn't for everybody.

For me, it feels familiar.

Small teams. High expectations. Smart people. Real ownership. Figure it out.

More importantly, the people doing that work genuinely care about the problem we're trying to solve.

Five Years Later

If anything, I believe in Beacon's mission more now than I did when Matt first described it to me in 2021.

I've seen how far the technology has come.

I've seen the quality of the people working on it.

I've watched pilots, military leaders, engineers, and others hear about what we're building for the first time and immediately start thinking about how it could help them.

The reaction is usually pretty intuitive because the underlying idea makes sense.

Flying is complicated. Humans have limits. Giving pilots better information and another tool to help them recognize risk and make decisions should make flying safer.

Actually building that system is incredibly difficult.

That's why it is worth doing.

After spending most of my adult life around aviation, I wanted whatever I did next to matter. I didn't want to leave one career built around a mission and spend the next part of my life doing something I couldn't care about.

I wanted to be part of the next major step in aviation safety.

That's why I joined Beacon.

And if that mission means something to you too, we're growing.

We're looking for people who want ownership, who are comfortable solving problems that don't come with instructions, and who want their work tied directly to an outcome that matters.

You can see what we're working on and the roles we're hiring for at Beacon's careers page. And if you don't see the perfect title but believe you can contribute to the mission, reach out anyway.

The mission is the reason I'm here.

It's also the reason I think the right people should be paying attention.

Originally published on Substack:
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