Biography
Karl Butler, M.Eng (Hons)
Originally from Birmingham in the UK, this English born Aerospace Engineer is currently still based within the EU. Having gained a Masters Degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Manchester, England and specialising in Aerodynamics and Reliability and Maintenance. Upon completion of his Masters degree, Karl moved away from the UK and found a position within the Defence Aerospace sector within Germany working on military aircraft for a large consortia for several years working within the systems engineering field concentrating more and more on reliability and maintenance requirements engineering. Working within this environment allowed him to appreciate and fully understand the importance of Requirements Management and systems integration, especially in the maintenance and supportability areas of engineering.
After this period within the defence sector, an opportunity presented itself to work in the civil aviation sector concentrating on the maintenance aspects of civil aircraft within a role that would enable him to hone his skills within the maintenance discipline, specifically MSG-3 (RCM) process and practices. During this period, Karl’s language skills increased significantly and that allowed him to increase his level of German language knowledge to the point of a high level of fluency, even today Karl hasn’t lost that ability of German language knowledge. After this project came to a close, a slightly different career experience materialised in the form of a contract within France for the same civil aircraft manufacturer however, based within France. This move presented a number of benefits, in terms of adding to his skill set; allowing him to re-kindle his French language skills which he had learnt as a child at a school level, but also compliment some of his other engineering skills in terms of risk management. This exposure to risk management practices and process has proven to be a worth while addition to Karl’s skill set as this allowed him to implement risk assessment in other aspects of his career as a contractor and later as a consultant. Thinking in terms of risk and risk mitigation in later roles has certainly added value to the benefit of other clients needs and has allowed Karl to offer an additional skill set not necessary available to clients from other consultants. .
Subsequent roles in the defence and military industries have reinforced Karl’s level of knowledge and experience within the reliability and maintenance discipline (ILS and RAMS), to the point where he is now considered an expert and a specialist in this area whereby he has been able to apply this knowledge gain to other industries, namely in the rail sector within recent years.
This has proven invaluable to the rail sector in many ways as the rail industry is gaining a considerable resurgence in new programmes as older rolling stock is being replaced with more advanced and complex integrated systems, where the knowledge and experience of ILS and RAMS from the Aerospace and Defence sectors are adding huge value to the product base offered by those early adopters of ILS and RAMS principles. Not only in the sense of benefit for the end users, (lower costs, better supportability) but also for the benefit in terms of design and production for the OEM’s in streamlining and optimising the manufacturing and systems integration process.
Karl’s abilities are not just purely all academic, he has abilities to foster a better working understanding by bringing together key aspects and integrating them to optimise the processes, to highlight areas of improvement and suggest solutions to not only to improve but to gain a significant advantage on the clients’ behalf and to those of the client’s customers.
