lick of English. I moved from a city of millions of people to a small town of 10,000. This profoundly changed the course of my life — for the better,” he says. “It not only allowed me the opportunity to immerse myself in a second language (he now additionally speaks Italian and Spanish) but also exposed me to a different culture. Becoming bilingual and bicultural has been a great asset for me.”
Let’s let Alexandre dispel another misimpression: United Rotorcraft does much more than customize medevac interiors. He says, “Yes, we are known for customizing medical interiors, but we also support law enforcement and firefighting, as well as manufacture a lot of military equipment, most of which is repeat work. We focus on mission-critical equipment: we can design, manufacture, certify, and install that equipment.” He further surprises with this fact: “Everyone wants some level of customization for their interior, avionics, and communication equipment, but 80 percent of our baseline work is common among type customers.” So, it makes perfect sense to streamline or standardize those common processes to make United Rotorcraft’s services more affordable and reliable for more customers. Alexandre says most people don’t realize that approximately 30 percent of United Rotorcraft’s business comes from manufacturing and assembling the same thing over and over again; that “thing” is medevac interiors for the U.S. Army Black Hawk. United Rotorcraft’s large military business is primarily production runs that scream for a balanced operations guy like Alexandre.
How a French citizen like Alexandre landed at his current American helicopter pad is an unconventional story that has no room for misimpressions. The best way to begin his story is to put away our French-English dictionary, for Alexandre has no hint of his native nation’s accent and his English vocabulary is precise and broad. He speaks as if he didn’t spend his young garçon days playing football (soccer) in Parisian parks, which he did, but instead talks like he grew up playing basketball on upstate New York courts — which he did. Hang your preconceptions at the door, come in from the cold and pull a chair by the fire, sip on a fine French wine (Alexandre’s favored pastime), and hear his tale...
From Paris to New York
Alexandre was born and grew up in Paris for his first decade of what has been an adventurous life of learning and travel. The Parisian boy’s father had a steady job working at Safran Engines (back then, the company was Snecma). Suddenly, Alexandre found himself moving with his sibling and homemaker mom to America as his father transferred to Clinton, New York, to work on supply chain issues. “I was in the sixth grade and didn’t know a
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One American offering Alexandre jumped into was basketball. “That became my sport,” he says. In fact, it became more than that; it eventually became his part-time job. At age 17 after returning to France, and for a period of five years, Alexandre actually played semiprofessional hoops for a club outside of Paris. Lest our imagination soar like Michael Jordan, Alexandre sets a screen to keep us in check. “Keep in mind that this was the late 1980s and basketball was just a developing sport in France; I wasn’t (French-American NBA player) Tony Parker!” But basketball and school were pretty much Alexandre’s young life and he continued the sport into adulthood. Unfortunately, a tendon tear a couple of years ago stifled his court prowess. “I’m still in denial that my basketball days are behind me,” he softly concedes.
Education and Service
While in France, Alexandre earned the equivalent of a U.S. bachelor’s degree at the ESSEC Business School. (A decade later, Alexandre earned a master’s degree in business from The Ohio State University.) Upon graduating from ESSEC, he did a stint with an artificial intelligence (AI) company until he began his compulsory year of military service for France. He spent 1991 in the French Air Force. “After the initial couple of months of training, it became mundane as I got parked at a base, but it’s not a bad idea to engage citizens in their country’s defense,” he says, noting that military service is no longer mandatory in France. That “parked” year was not idle. He says, “So many in the aviation industry are military trained; being familiar with military culture is an asset.”
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