An airplane has a public birthday: the rollout, the first flight, the moment somebody cuts a ribbon. Thomas Gentile works in a business whose commitments precede all that. Before a manufacturer can celebrate an aircraft, somebody has to make the material that will become part of it. At Hexcel, where he is chairman, chief executive and president, the future arrives as a production problem.
His career has brought him progressively closer to that starting point. He led GE Aviation Services, then Spirit AeroSystems, then Hexcel. Engine maintenance, aircraft structures, advanced materials: three different views of flight, each dependent on the others. The passenger sees an airplane. Gentile has managed businesses responsible for several of the things that allow one to exist.
The shift is intriguing because his formal education was in economics, followed by an MBA, both at Harvard. He also studied international relations at the London School of Economics. His route into industrial leadership began in business and strategy. The vocabulary now includes carbon fiber, resins, honeycomb and factory capacity. Economics has plenty to do with whether those materials ever leave the building.
At Hexcel, the attraction of lightweight materials meets the less photogenic matter of making enough of them, consistently, when customers need them. A promising material can command attention at an exhibition. Supplying it for an aircraft program requires an organization. Gentile’s working territory is the distance between those two accomplishments.
Detroit, then a much larger map
Gentile was born and raised in Detroit. His early career included leadership and strategy work at General Motors, CBS and McKinsey & Company. That is an unusually varied collection of employers for someone now associated with aerospace: automobiles, broadcasting, consulting. It gave him a career across businesses before he became identified with a particular piece of the industrial world.
He joined GE in 1998 and held leadership positions in the United States, France and Australia. The international experience was practical, involving businesses in different countries, rather than simply collecting stamps between meetings. By 2008 he was leading GE Aviation Services, a global operation handling maintenance, repair, overhaul and spare parts for commercial jet engines.
From 2014 to 2016 he was president and chief operating officer of GE Capital. His responsibilities covered global operations, information technology and capital planning during a substantial contraction and reshaping of the financial business. This was leadership exercised through an operating system: what the company owned, how it worked, where resources went and how its parts fitted together.
His public writing supplies a quieter counterpoint to the industrial résumé. On LinkedIn, his article titles have included “Preserving the Holiday Card Tradition” and “Setting down the smartphone.” They put everyday questions about communication alongside a career spent managing large organizations. Even a chief executive’s published interests can make room for the decidedly unindustrial business of sending someone a card.
The businesses differed in their products and scale. The recurring assignment was to coordinate complicated organizations. That continuity helps explain the later move to a materials company. Gentile’s résumé is less a straight ladder within one specialty than a succession of jobs in which the product depends on many people getting their work to agree.
Wichita was more than a posting
Gentile joined Spirit AeroSystems as executive vice president and chief operating officer in April 2016 and became chief executive that year. The Wichita company supplied structures for commercial and military aircraft. Its work put him in the middle of the aircraft supply chain, with the demands of large customers on one side and the realities of a manufacturing organization on the other.
In 2017, Gentile tracked his time for a 13-week Harvard study. The executive himself had become something to measure. A calendar can be wonderfully persuasive about one’s priorities until someone adds up the hours.
Wichita’s role in his career also appears in his community commitments. Gentile’s public affiliations include Kansas Big Brothers Big Sisters and the YMCA Foundation of Wichita. Together with his university work, they give the city a presence in his biography beyond the location of an employer. A corporate appointment brought him into Wichita’s manufacturing world; his listed commitments reach into its civic institutions as well.
His Wichita connections also extended into education. In 2021 he became the Barton School of Business’s inaugural Executive-in-Residence at Wichita State. The work included discussing curriculum and industry trends with school leaders, meeting students about careers and life skills, and engaging executives on what business education should prepare people to do.
He joined the dean’s advisory board in 2022. “The future of business is being shaped in universities across the country,” he said at the time. In December 2023, the relationship expanded again when he became executive advisor to the dean. The sequence matters: a campus visit became a continuing responsibility, linking an industrial career to the people preparing for their first one.
“The future of business is being shaped in universities across the country.”Thomas Gentile · 2022
The difficult ending belongs in the story
Gentile’s tenure at Spirit ended in 2023. His resignation was announced on October 2, and Patrick Shanahan became interim chief executive. The company was facing production difficulties, financial pressure and the aftermath of a brief machinists’ strike. Any account that jumps directly from his appointment at Spirit to his appointment at Hexcel leaves out a consequential part of the journey.
Manufacturing careers do not move exclusively through celebratory announcements. For a supplier, trouble can arrive through the customer’s production schedule, the supplier’s own execution or the interaction between them. Spirit’s difficulties were real, and the change in leadership was real. They form the immediate background to Gentile’s next appointment.
Hexcel announced his selection in April 2024, following a succession process, with a May 1 start. He succeeded Nick Stanage as chief executive and president. In December he also became chairman. The move put an executive familiar with buying and using aerospace materials at the head of a company making them.
That experience was central to the appointment. Hexcel’s directors pointed to his knowledge of both airframes and jet engines, along with operational experience. The proposition was specific: someone who understood the demands further along the chain would now lead the business supplying an earlier link. The new job came with an opportunity to apply that knowledge under a different set of constraints.
A material still needs a factory
Hexcel’s portfolio includes carbon fiber, reinforcement fabrics, prepregs, resins, adhesives, honeycomb and composite structures. At JEC World in March 2026, the company presented materials for aerospace, defense and automotive uses, including scalable thermoplastic solutions. The variety gives a sense of Gentile’s assignment: a materials company has to connect laboratory capability with multiple kinds of customer and production process.
In his JEC TV interview that year, Gentile discussed materials innovation, relationships with aircraft manufacturers and manufacturing performance across Hexcel’s operations. Those subjects belong together. A material’s value depends partly on what a customer can do with it; the commercial relationship depends partly on whether the supplier can deliver it in a usable, repeatable form.
His April 2026 appearance on The Factory Doctor podcast returned to organizational coordination. The discussion covered translating a mission into execution and getting operations, supply chain, quality and workforce to function together. It is a useful counterpart to the polished exhibition stand. A booth displays the result; the factory has to reproduce it.
His outside responsibilities widened that same month. RPM International appointed him to its board on April 20, including its compensation committee. He also has aerospace connections through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Aerospace Industries Association and the Wings Club. He chaired the AIA in 2023. These are different vantage points on the manufacturers, institutions and people around the business of flight.
The recovery arrives with a hiring bill
His aviation affiliations also include the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where he is an emeritus board member. Alongside an industry association and an aviation club, the museum adds a historical institution to the list. His work touches the business of supplying future aircraft while those affiliations connect him to organizations concerned with the wider life and history of flight.
The present test is concrete. Hexcel’s third-quarter 2026 sales were $496.4 million, up from $456.2 million a year earlier. Commercial aerospace sales rose 20.5 percent. Defense, Space & Other sales fell 8.7 percent. The recovery was uneven, with growing aircraft demand alongside softer programs elsewhere in the portfolio.
Gentile described the expense of accelerating hiring and training ahead of expected demand. The company reaffirmed its full-year guidance. For the executive, that creates a familiar industrial timing question: how much readiness should a business pay for before the corresponding sales arrive? Waiting costs something. Preparing costs something, too.
Year-over-year change. Total quarterly sales: $496.4 million.
The preceding year had supplied a warning about schedules. Delayed aircraft production increases and inventory reductions in the supply chain had weighed on Hexcel’s 2025 sales and margins, particularly around the Airbus A350. In his year-end outlook, Gentile emphasized preparing operations and deploying capital with discipline as commercial production recovered.
This is where his earlier roles become relevant to the current one. He has worked around engines already in service, structures moving toward final assembly and financial operations being reorganized. At Hexcel, the questions arrive farther upstream, but they still concern timing, resources and execution. A production forecast becomes a decision about people and equipment before it becomes reported revenue.
There is a pleasing tension in the assignment. Gentile leads a business devoted to taking weight out of things while carrying the considerable weight of its commitments. His next chapter will be written through customer deliveries, trained employees and factories able to keep pace. Long before another airplane receives its public birthday, some of its important appointments will already have been kept.