Lamas
learned
Stress Test another
powerful,
but almost painful, lesson at the next company in his aerospace career when he left Bell to join Maxar Technologies, a satellite-launching company in Denver, as its senior director of strategy and corporate development. He had been at Maxar for six months when the company lost a satellite. That loss threatened the business financially and Lamas, his boss, and many others were laid off to cut expenses. “That was a stressful time,” he said, “but I learned the importance of maintaining a personal, professional network to find another great opportunity. That time reinforced the importance of resilience I learned in the military.”
That next “great opportunity” happened at the infrastructure consulting firm AECOM in 2019 when Lamas became its senior director for operations leadership and rose to become VP of federal ventures when he led proposal teams to win approximately $50 million in government contracts.
After that success, he returned to
aerospace in 2022 to be president of Thrust Flight, a fixed-wing trainer in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. “What’s amazing about aerospace is that it gets in your blood,” Lamas said. “You may try to go away to do something else, but you come back.” In his year leading Thrust Flight, Lamas and his team of over 100 employees grew revenue over 30%.
Servant Leader
As he now leads Loft Dynamics in North America,
Lamas draws on the servant-
leadership model he learned in the military. “The most important thing you do as a leader is take care of your people. You get them the tools they need for success, clear obstacles for that success, and make sure that they have the proper training and guidance to become the very best they can be in accomplishing the organization’s mission,” he said. “I think most people want to be successful, and want to be good at what they do. My job as a leader is to really enable that. I also want to make sure that people are noticed and that they feel their work is worthwhile. That recognition genuinely contributes to the overall success of the organization. Most importantly, the people I lead have a voice and should feel that their voice is heard. Those are the cornerstones of my leadership style, and I like to think it’s been relatively successful.”
Lamas is calling upon that foundation for success to meet what he thinks is
Loft Back to Helis
This year, Lamas returned to rotorcraft when he joined the virtual-reality simulator training company Loft Dynamics as its vice president for North America. What called him back to helicopters? Lamas comprehensively answered, “Helicopters have an amazing diverse customer base: offshore transport, police, firefighting, air ambulance, utility work, and it goes on. What fascinates me about rotorcraft is the challenge around trying to develop and product-engineer them. It’s one of the tougher engineering problems
14 July/Aug 2024
that exist out there if you think about it. Then, after design and manufacturing produces a safe and reliable
aircraft,
comes the question: How do you support their
multitude of different customers
who have different needs? Resources are limited and you cannot be everything to everybody, but how do you meet customers’ needs in ways that make them feel like they’re properly supported? I just found these challenges with helicopters fascinating and really, really have enjoyed the challenges and industry.”
Dynamics’ great challenge, which ironically derives from the company’s great asset: its new virtual technology that makes helicopter training more realistic and cost-effective. “Getting customers to seriously consider our new technology is the main challenge. Aviation is generally and understandably conservative and reluctant to try new technology,” he said. “Virtual-reality technology is new and relatively unknown to flight simulation. Getting customers into our simulators is crucial to their understanding of how good our technology is for enhancing training, especially for closed-in- and-tight flight environments that are not well duplicated by traditional simulators. This is precisely why we opened our first demo center this year at Santa Monica Municipal Airport — it’s truly a see-it-to-believe-it experience.”
Yet, Lamas thinks that Loft Dynamics will rise to this challenge because of the intense industry focus on flight safety. He said, “The rotorcraft industry is highly focused on safety, and we have technology that can bring high- quality and affordable training to more people throughout the industry. With our technology, recurrent training can become more effective, more affordable and more frequent, which was key when I flew in the Navy and is key to keeping rotorcraft pilots trained up today. Safety increases when we pilots default to good, realistic and frequent training.”
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