Alex Mattos and the Six-Month Appointment

British Airways gave Alex Mattos a date, of sorts. If the fledgling business was still around in six months, the airline would hear from it again. Mattos and his colleagues came back on the appointed day. They brought results from a trial with Virgin Atlantic. Six months is a long time to wait for a meeting; it is also a useful amount of time to become harder to dismiss.

Virgin had let i6 try its technology in a working operation without paying for the experiment. The founders had deliberately approached an airline whose brand suggested a willingness to take a chance. That first deployment supplied evidence. When an incumbent provider went into liquidation, British Airways needed an answer, and i6 was already in the conversation.

The story suits Mattos's business rather well. Fuel operations depend on information arriving where it belongs, when it belongs there. In this instance, the founders made sure they did, too.

A different sort of fuel problem

Before i6, Mattos worked on the engineering inside aviation. In September 2011, he and Steve Uhrmacher appeared together in an aerospace testing interview. Mattos headed engineering for the Test Solutions business at Ultra Electronics Electrics; Uhrmacher headed sales. One looked after technical and support work, the other new business and customer relationships.

Their remit ran from designing electronic test equipment to installing it, training people and supporting it in service. Fuel systems and aircraft data networks were part of the work. These were products intended to help find faults and establish whether complicated equipment performed as it should. The relationship between a measurement and a dependable decision was already their territory.

The pair later tried to bring military fuel-testing technology into commercial aviation. That original proposition failed. What survived was their view of the work around it: paper travelling around airports, numbers entered again, separate organisations unable to see the same information at the same time. An engineer can spend years improving an instrument and then discover that the troublesome component is a clipboard.

i6 Group's own company timeline places the founders' coming together in 2015 and the British Airways launch at Heathrow in 2016. Mattos's later recollections dwell on the practical work of getting accepted. A recognised airline using the product mattered because another airline could ask whether it actually worked.

The customer has several desks

Seen from a passenger seat, refuelling looks like a hose and a vehicle. Seen from Mattos's side, it is an agreement among people with different jobs, employers and priorities. The airline wants the right uplift. The operator must deliver it. Suppliers need usable records. Someone has to reconcile the bill.

His early sales experience involved fuel teams, flight operations, pilot unions and finance. A product could satisfy one department while leaving another unconvinced. Getting through that process required finding the people who could use it and bringing the surrounding decision-makers along.

That helps explain why the company now describes its platform through the organisations it connects: airlines, fuel suppliers, into-plane operators and fuel farms. Mattos's work has expanded from testing a system's parts to arranging agreement among its participants. A correct number is more valuable when everyone who needs it can act on it.

He also writes about how the job varies by market. In the United States, an airline may manage its fuel supply from ordering through delivery and inventory. Elsewhere, an airline buying fuel delivered into the aircraft faces a different set of handoffs. The same software category can contain quite different working days.

Even the login has a boarding queue

As chief operating officer, Mattos encountered a less photogenic obstacle to expansion: signing people in. Customers had their own identity systems and security requirements. Building a fresh integration for each one threatened to turn every new account into another engineering project.

The scale was tangible. British Airways had thousands of pilots, and i6 did not want to maintain a separate set of accounts for all of them. Using Auth0 for single sign-on let customers retain control of access while i6 concentrated on its own software. Mattos described one configuration taking a couple of days, with approval inside a week.

There is a useful lack of ceremony about this episode. A company hoping to connect airports around the world still has to deal with passwords. The decision reveals an operational question that recurs in his work: which problem should the team solve itself, and which one can a partner solve reliably enough to let it move on?

“Our goal is to build 24/7 development and support”

Alex Mattos

That ambition appears in his description of i6's work with Smart Working, which supplies engineering talent. Around-the-clock development and support is a concrete aspiration for a business whose customers operate across time zones. A refuelling team beginning its shift cannot be particularly interested in whether the software company's office has opened.

Connections after office hours

Mattos studied at the University of Southampton from 2000 to 2003. His public professional record also lists electronic engineering and systems engineering management among his qualifications and training. The technical thread continues beyond his paid work.

At Gorsley Baptist Church, he has listed responsibility for network infrastructure, including telephones and data, since July 2014. His audio and video volunteering dates to January 2009. He has also listed service as a foundation governor at Ann Cam C of E Primary School from September 2017.

Those are jobs with their own version of a demanding customer: people who expect the equipment to work when they need it. They add some texture to the executive title. At a company summit in Manchester in 2026, Mattos used Top Gun to discuss the value of connections away from everyday work. The gathering also involved darts. Aviation references evidently survived the trip indoors.

What seven and a half hours looks like

The consequences of his work become easier to picture at KLM. The relationship began with a conversation at an IATA conference in 2018, followed by digitisation at Schiphol in 2019. By September 2026, Mattos was discussing a reduction in daily fuel administration from eight hours to thirty minutes.

KLM confirmed the reported time savings and described ground teams treating the platform as part of their daily work. The distinction matters: those hours refer to administration around fuel, rather than the time it takes to pump fuel into an aircraft. The improvement is in the record-keeping and coordination that surround the physical delivery.

His argument for digital operations is often this practical. A changed gate or an early arrival should reach the people dispatching fuel. An accurate delivery record should reach the people settling invoices. A pilot should be able to amend an order without beginning another chain of verbal messages.

In his writing on ground handling, Mattos treats shared information as a way for service providers to show airlines how well they perform. Visibility changes the commercial conversation as well as the dispatcher's screen. It lets the people doing the work demonstrate the result.

The next meeting has more people in it

Mattos lists April 2025 as the start of his tenure as CEO and managing director. The financing that followed in October 2025 brought $20 million in Series B investment, led by Yttrium with IAG, World Kinect and Shell Ventures participating. The announced uses included international expansion, technology and data infrastructure, and stronger delivery teams.

By 2026, i6 was reporting operations at more than 300 airports. A completed Shell Aviation rollout covered more than 70 airports across several regions, with Canada included in the final phase. These deployments turn the original challenge into a larger one: keeping a common platform useful across many local operations.

easyJet announced an eHandshake partnership in August 2026. Its pilots would order and confirm fuel through technology integrated into their existing ETechlog system. The phased plan initially covered roughly half the network, with expansion expected over three years. Mattos emphasised communication and accuracy. Integration into a tool pilots already use is a telling detail: another application is less useful if it adds another chore.

In September, Harald Eisenaecher became i6's chair. Mattos welcomed the combination of aviation experience and technology governance. In October, Mattos joined Ryanair's Steven Fitzgerald at the World Aviation Festival in Lisbon to discuss digital fuelling within a 25-minute turnaround. He also joined a panel with representatives from Menzies and easyJet. The early problem of persuading several parties has become the everyday substance of his role.

A useful number, delivered on time

His appetite for new technology comes with an engineer's qualification. Discussing artificial intelligence in September 2026, Mattos welcomed its ability to examine large volumes of operational data and identify improvements. He also made clear that uncertainty about an aircraft's actual fuel delivery would be unacceptable. Analysis can help people ask better questions; the underlying record still has to be dependable.

He has described an ambition for a worldwide digital platform that extends the savings in administration, cost and turnaround time to more airlines. That aspiration follows a fairly consistent path through his career: measuring a fuel system, joining up fuel records, then making those records usable across an industry.

There is something pleasingly ordinary about the object at the centre of it. A fuel slip has no engines, no wings and a limited claim to romance. Yet it can make a great many people wait. Mattos has built his working life around giving them fewer reasons to.