Good Things Happen When Vets Team Up with Honeywell Technology

The aviation expertise and life skills developed during military service are helping a Honeywell Flight Services Operations team make skies easier for business aviation pilots to navigate.

With Military Appreciation Month being observed during May, the team’s success is just one of many examples that demonstrate how Honeywell and the military share a common mission to make the world a safer place.

Pradeep Arora, Sr. Manager of Flight Operations, leads the team of 24 ex-defense personnel in Hyderabad, India, who support Honeywell’s GoDirect Flight Services. These services are offered to customers on a website and an app called Flight Bag Pro. GoDirect Flight Bag Pro is an electronic flight bag app that pilots depend on for optimized flight planning to cut operating costs and increase awareness of real-time weather and aircraft performance data.

Skills that team members gained in air traffic control, dispatch and radar operations while in the military are instrumental to the work they do today at Honeywell.

“The team provides a pilot with preflight and inflight support,” Arora said. “Advising an airborne cockpit, in real time on the other side of the world, on how to negotiate the weather requires you to be on top of your game.”

He joined the Services Training Institute at 16, eventually flying Sea Harrier fighter aircraft in the Navy. He sees first-hand how the discipline, precision and initiative required in the military translate to the team’s daily tasks.

“Being a 24x7 team with continuous deliverables means members must work independently most of the time,” Arora said. “The team is responsible for planning flights for pilots and providing them with airborne updates on the weather and traffic.

“Some of these inputs can be critical, especially when you are serving max range flights in bad weather – you don’t want to get your fuel calculations messed up or send bad information on the status of the airspace,” he added. “Every team member understands the value of the services he provides and the consequences of getting it wrong.”

Team members are closely involved in the design, development and testing of the Web portal that is the backbone of Flight Bag Pro, with the app using its data feed. They also perform the final round of User Acceptance Testing.

Arora noted the ability to follow processes and work as a team is ingrained for those in uniform, and serves his team well on the job, too.

“The team takes care of situations on their own, everyone is disciplined, successful and efficient,” he said. “We think about punctuality the same way. There is a sense of maturity and discipline required for the team to be successful. There is a responsibility with our type of work which they are able to accept and uphold to our customers.”