Aviation loves an unveiling. Curtains part, cameras rise, and a new machine is introduced in the confident future tense. Brian Sartain works in another tense altogether. His world begins when the applause has moved on, while the airplane, inconveniently and rather splendidly, keeps flying.
The useful life of an aircraft is an argument against tidy endings. Platforms remain in service for thirty years and more. Retirement dates slip. New-aircraft production meets delays. A component designed under one generation of engineers may still be needed by the next two. The original manufacturer, sensibly enough, wants its factory floor and engineering hours for newer products. The operator, just as sensibly, wants the landing gear to come down.
Sartain sits inside that tension as chief operating officer of Ontic, a specialist aerospace manufacturer and repair provider. The title is easily misunderstood. He is not Ontic's chief executive; Jean-Christophe Gallagher holds that post. Sartain's remit is operations: the factories, transfers, supply chains, repairs and exacting promises that turn a licensed drawing into a certified part delivered when an aircraft needs it.
An education in everything around the airplane
Sartain studied aerospace engineering at the University of Minnesota and later completed an executive masters program at the university's Carlson School of Management. At the 2026 Farnborough International Airshow, he recalled the assumption carried by many young engineers: the degree would lead to designing airplanes. Reality was more interesting and less cinematic. Few people design a whole aircraft. They solve one problem, then another, then discover that the system around the hardware is often the larger puzzle.
“Engineering is just all about problem solving.”Brian Sartain, Farnborough International Airshow, 2026
His career became a tour through those surrounding systems. At Goodrich Aerospace he held vice president and general manager roles, including responsibility for interiors, cabin and lighting systems. A 2012 Lufthansa retrofit announcement finds him discussing LED runway turnoff lights designed to last longer and install quickly. He later led business development for sensors and integrated systems at United Technologies Aerospace Systems, then moved to Chromalloy, where turbine components brought another set of tolerances, customers and military requirements.
In 2018, AAR hired him as senior vice president of Repair and Engineering Services. The portfolio was broad: airframe maintenance, component repair, engineering, landing gear and composites. He was elected a corporate officer the following year. By the time he left for Ontic in 2023, his organization encompassed MRO, engineering development and manufacturing businesses with more than 3,500 employees.
Those years coincided with a punishing lesson in capacity. Even before the pandemic, skilled mechanics were retiring faster than the industry could replace them. In 2019 Sartain described experienced technicians in their late fifties beginning to leave while new graduates were drawn toward better-paid manufacturing work. During the travel collapse, AAR held onto mechanics and kept hiring in some locations; when traffic returned, demand rose steeply. Hangar space mattered. Skilled hands mattered more.
A retirement forecast is only a forecast
Sartain arrived at Ontic on June 5, 2023. The company's proposition sounds almost antique until one notices how modern its problem has become. When a product line is still essential but no longer central to its maker, Ontic may buy the intellectual property or take a license. It collects drawings, tooling and machinery. Its transfer teams work beside the original manufacturer's people, absorbing production knowledge and supplier relationships before moving the line into an Ontic facility. The company becomes the OEM of record, responsible for new manufacture, aftermarket repair and existing customer obligations.
Sartain dislikes calling these products “legacy,” as though age were a diagnosis. He prefers “mature” or “non-core.” The distinction is not cosmetic. A hydraulic selector valve may be unfashionable beside an electronic system, yet thousands of aircraft still depend on one to actuate their landing gear. The technology is old only in the catalog. In the air, it remains employed.
He offered that estimate in 2026 while explaining the market for established aircraft. During one recent period, he said, the share retiring on schedule fell nearer half. The reasons vary: production constraints on replacement aircraft, technical trouble with newer engines, or simply the durable economics of a paid-for machine. His favorite extreme is the B-52, which appears capable of becoming a 100-year aircraft. A century is a very long time to keep a supply chain from forgetting.
Forgetfulness comes in practical forms. A specified alloy becomes scarce. A low-volume order no longer interests a machining supplier. An electronic component designed in the 1980s disappears. The approved vendor exists on paper but lacks capacity. Ontic's answer may be to qualify another source, make a piece internally, or redesign around current technology while preserving the behavior of the original unit.
This is where the humble cockpit knob earns its absurd grandeur. Sartain has used it to explain reverse engineering in aviation. A replacement cannot merely fit the hole. It must look and behave like the original so that a pilot moving among aircraft does not meet an unfamiliar feel at the wrong moment. Certification turns apparent simplicity into a thicket. The knob, innocent of all this, merely waits to be touched.
Preparedness before the expensive surprise
Sartain's public language is that of an operator: capacity, visibility, qualification, turnaround. Yet underneath it sits a broader ethic. Resilience should begin before a component becomes unavailable. A bill of materials should be reviewed when a program arrives. Supplier health, material risk and obsolescence should be treated as design constraints, not future inconveniences. A disruption prevented early never gets the chance to become a case study.
That approach can conflict with the seductions of scale. Mature aerospace work is high-mix and low-volume. Suppliers built for long runs may neglect a tiny batch, however critical the part. Ontic's facilities and purchasing relationships must be designed for awkward quantities. When no outside supplier can make the economics work, Sartain argues that the company sometimes needs to invest in its own engineering or manufacturing capacity. A modest intervention can avoid a redesign and requalification program costing a customer tens of millions.
“We don't like to say legacy like this is bad.”Brian Sartain on mature technology, Farnborough, 2026
The work is widening. Ontic has invested more than $30 million in dedicated MRO capacity, including a 64,000-square-foot facility in Miramar, Florida, and a counterpart in Tewkesbury in the United Kingdom. A new Weston, Florida, site is intended to add original-equipment production space from 2027. Sartain describes the purpose without ornament: room to take on more lines while preserving quality, delivery and responsiveness.
In July 2026, Ontic also announced a partnership with CFS Aero aimed at established engine and auxiliary power unit programs. Here Sartain was unusually explicit about a boundary. Ontic already handles engine components, but it does not possess every capability required for the hot section or for system-level turbine work. CFS brings engineering, certification and test-stand experience. Experienced hands should be involved from the outset, he said. Ambition, in this telling, includes knowing which expertise to borrow.
The same restraint governs relations with the manufacturers that transfer their products. Ontic can improve reliability and redesign around obsolete pieces, but Sartain says it should not develop products that compete with the partner's newer technology. The compact is one of stewardship: free the original maker to move forward, then give the established product a home where small volumes and long obligations count as the main business.
What continuity looks like from the factory floor
A former colleague once described Sartain's leadership as polished but attentive, crediting him with critical listening and a habit of meeting people throughout an organization. The observation fits his operating domain. Drawings are essential; memory is too. A transfer fails if the tacit knowledge held by machinists, technicians and engineers fails to travel with the tool. Supply chains are maps made partly of contracts and partly of people who know whom to call.
Sartain's own career has joined the technical and commercial halves of that map. The aerospace degree supplies respect for the part. Business leadership supplies respect for the system that must repeatedly produce it. Years in MRO add respect for time, because a grounded aircraft turns every late delivery into a very visible expense.
There is no romance in a shortage of potentiometers. No child points at the sky and dreams of supplier qualification. Yet flight depends on both. Sartain's work is a useful correction to aviation's fondness for beginnings. An airplane's first flight is a date. Its working life is a daily negotiation among metal, regulation, economics and memory.
The future of flight will be electric in more places, and clean-sheet aircraft will eventually replace many hydraulic, pneumatic and electromechanical systems. Eventually is the important word. Until then, yesterday's technology will keep carrying passengers, freight and military crews. It will require engineers who enjoy puzzles, operators who plan before panic, and factories willing to make ten difficult things rather than ten thousand easy ones.
That is the afterlife Sartain manages. Not a museum of old parts, but a living industry of second acts. The aircraft remains on the schedule. The part must do the same.