Few careers in aerospace illustrate the power of curiosity and hands-on experience quite like Lawrence Blakeley's. From lying in his back garden as a child watching Lancaster bombers fly over Duxford, to leading engineering at one of the world's most ambitious electric aircraft companies, Lawrence has built a career defined by restless curiosity, practical grounding, and a willingness to step into the unknown. His journey from apprentice technician at Marshall Aerospace, through 12 years at Airbus and pioneering roles at Vertical Aerospace and H55, to his current position as VP Engineering at Beta Technologies, offers a masterclass in how engineering careers can evolve when you follow what fascinates you. With sustainability as a core theme for the IET Aerospace Technical Network this year, Lawrence's story is especially timely. His work sits at the heart of making electric aviation a reality, not just in the air, but on the ground, tackling the infrastructure, certification, and engineering challenges that will define whether sustainable aviation truly takes off.
You started your career as an apprentice at Marshall Aerospace. How did that come about?
It starts before then, to be fair. I grew up in a small village just south of Cambridge that’s actually on the flight path for Duxford Airfield. As a really young kid, I used to lie in my back garden and watch air shows go over my head. Lancaster bombers in formation with Spitfires and Hurricanes. As I grew up, I played golf near Duxford and there was always old aircraft flying around. I think that gave me an excitement about aerospace that has never really left.
When I was looking at what to do at 16, do I go and study A levels or do something else? I’m much more vocationally minded than academic. Talking it through with my parents, they were encouraging me to think about what I was good at, what I really enjoyed, and what education I’d need for a next step. And I enjoyed physical things, practical things: working on cars, aircraft, going to old aircraft museums. It was a good time for apprenticeships, so I thought, why not?
I still remember the conversation where I had to decide between a structures or mechanical apprenticeship and an electrical apprenticeship. My dad said, look, the future is not in the structures side. The future is in the electrical side. Things will become more and more electric. That feels quite flippant now, but that conversation set the course for what ended up being my career.
Marshall’s was excellent. I really enjoyed my time there. I realised I wasn’t ready to give up academia, but I wanted to understand what I was studying for. Working at Marshall’s, I understood how systems engineering translates into the work environment. Before that experience, I found it really hard to make that connection.
A lot of my time as a technician was spent talking to design engineers and manufacturing engineers. Either something didn’t fit or they wanted me to try something. I thought that was a really interesting addition to my capability, so I chose to study manufacturing engineering.
I really enjoyed my degree because I could put it all in context. When I was looking at how to break down a finished design into subcomponents and put a work instruction together, I could imagine myself on the aircraft building the thing. I needed that understanding. I’m very happy I did it that way round. It’s not the same for everybody, but having that work experience at university was really useful for me.
What happened after you graduated?
I graduated at the same time as September the 11th, which was unhelpful for continuing my aerospace career because there suddenly weren’t any jobs anymore. I was forced to take a different tack. First De La Rue, which is banknote manufacturing, and then pharmaceutical. Looking back, both were highly regulated industries with very different challenges. But throughout that time, I really just wanted to get back to aerospace.
I learnt about making machines more efficient, improving yield, understanding the wastes associated with processes. It was useful, but it wasn’t my passion. I found it hard to be fully motivated. As much as I enjoyed the day-to-day work, holistically it wasn’t where I wanted to be.
How did you get into Airbus, and how did your earlier experience help?
The first opportunity I got was a role at Airbus. I still remember the early conversations where I went in to look after electrical design on an A400M wing. The manufacturing engineers would say, you can’t install it like that, the technician can’t do this. And I was able to articulate that actually, as a technician, this is how I would go in and do it. If you look at the manufacturing steps, this is how you can lay it out, and the design works.
I didn’t build my career purposefully in that respect, but having that earlier experience made me a much more effective designer because I was looking through the eyes of the customer of the design: somebody enacting my design on the shop floor.
I basically kept backing up the food chain. I started as a technician, then looked at manufacturing engineering, then design. I then looked at how you qualify and certify the design with the authorities, then at how you develop new materials, practices, procedures and products to better meet the certification requirements. And then at how you change the certification requirements to better reflect what’s on an aircraft. None of that was purposeful.
It was curiosity that led me to ask, who is influencing how I do things? I’m going to get curious about that so I can be better at my day job. All of that was in Airbus, over 12 years.
How did you find the transition into people leadership?
On the A400M, I realised I quite liked leading people, so I ended up in a people leadership role. You’ve really got to want that additional dimension. Suddenly it’s not binary. A design either works or it doesn’t. It meets the requirements or it doesn’t. The equation gives the right answer or it doesn’t. People leadership was a really interesting step into things that weren’t always as expected.
I started leading people and then focused more on the technical side. I spent some time in Toulouse on requirements and certification, much more technically focused. But during that time, I ended up running some R&D projects, which brought me back into the people side. I really enjoyed that. Delivering through people, having people be the best that they can be, was really satisfying. I ended my time at Airbus leading electrical installation across the company, while also being technically credible, which was quite nice.
What made you leave Airbus?
I got a bit bored with corporate life, in all honesty. It coincided with me sitting a promotion board. I was doing a role, but at a lower level than the role was pegged at. I needed to pass an assessment centre, and I didn’t.
I sat back and thought, I’m doing the role, everyone says I’m doing it well, and I didn’t get very good feedback about why I didn’t pass. My own reflection was that I didn’t manage the conflict resolution very well, which I’m okay with. If I didn’t do something well, it’s fine to learn from that.
But then I thought, I’m just reliant on this corporate world. I’m going to step around a very well-trodden path and end up in the same position in 30 years. I wanted something more exciting.
How did the move to Vertical Aerospace happen?
There’s a lot of luck in how careers develop. It coincided with what became Vertical Aerospace in Bristol recruiting. It was really covert, and quite hilarious. Somebody approached me: would you be interested in this role? I said, what role? They said, we can’t tell you. You need to sign this NDA and come and meet these people.
I met in one building, and they said, okay, we like him, we’re going to take him to another building. That’s where I was shown what they were working on. I don’t know if it was part of the act to get people interested, but I found it really good fun. I walked away thinking, this is the thing that isn’t predictable.
I was moving from a hugely predictable world where I was bored, into something exciting. I thought, if I get two years out of doing something completely different, I’ll have learned a lot. And again, I was stepping into an arena that took my core capability but pushed me out one more step. Developing a full electric aircraft: completely new, needs certification, needs a business, needs customers, needs everything.
I took that role in 2017. Because I was coming from a leadership position and was technically minded, I ended up growing the technical part of Vertical. That meant establishing how Vertical would work with the authorities and how the design organisation would be structured. It was a huge catalyst. I would never have had that growth anywhere else. I was very lucky to have been wanting to move at the right time, when the eVTOL industry was taking off.
I grew up with Vertical, then moved to Switzerland with H55, building on what I’d learned. Moving into the C-suite and understanding that world was quite different. Beta is in such a strong position globally with respect to developing its aircraft and its infrastructure. It was a very attractive move when they approached.
You’re also involved with Urban Airport and Xcert.ai. How do those fit in?
I’ve got a few things on the side, and they’re really about understanding the industry better. Urban Airport is so I can understand what’s happening on the ground. How do electric aircraft get enabled in the air if there’s no ground infrastructure? And Xcert.ai is about AI, which is a newish technology that’s going to change how everybody works. I want to be involved and steer that, rather than be a recipient.
Working with regulators on novel aircraft: where do you even start?
My first real negotiation with EASA was when I was at Airbus. I developed a new bracket, which is actually still on my desk as a reminder. It replaced a load of brackets underneath the passenger floor on an A350: simplified things, cheaper, less weight. But I had to change how Airbus was satisfying one requirement with EASA.
I spent about nine months getting testing results to justify that one change. In my initial discussion, I was thinking I could just talk logic, talk it through and say, look, we’re going to do this, it’s better for everybody. Their response was: it sounds great, prove it.
So what tests do I need to define? How do I justify this is a valid move? With Airbus, there are hundreds of people on an aircraft. Aircraft are already flying. If they accept that change, it affects all aircraft in service. So their expectation of what I needed to demonstrate was really very high.
That was the penny-drop moment for me. Words are great, but the aerospace regulations aren’t built on people sitting in a room talking about logical things. They’re built on people building aircraft, flying aircraft, finding issues and then reacting to those issues and embedding them back into the regulation. That’s a hundred years of aviation leading to the regulations we use today.
How did that experience translate when certifying novel electric aircraft?
When I started working with EASA and the CAA in the UK, it always starts with some discussion: this is what we intend to do. The authorities never really steer you. They tell you what you can’t do, not what you can do, which is a bit frustrating at times.
I remember a conversation where the authorities said they were going to treat a battery like a fuel tank, and therefore the regulations would follow accordingly. But fuel behaves very differently to a battery. Fuel is a very exciting event at the beginning and then it burns for a long time. Batteries aren’t like that, certainly when you have smaller cells. One fails, then the next, then the next. It’s a much more drawn-out event. Very hot, but very isolated in one location, propagating over time. It doesn’t generally spontaneously combust. With fuel, you have a bad landing, temperature in the wrong place, and the whole fuel tank is liable. With a battery, you have one cell that’s liable.
So I put two rough tests together. One where I dropped a battery from 50 feet, and another where I put a Bunsen burner underneath it. Then I invited the CAA and EASA to come and witness the tests. I said, look, it does not behave like a fuel tank. I dropped it and nothing happened. It sat on the floor. We left it 24 hours. Nothing happened. Then we set fire to the battery pack and it took at least 15 minutes to propagate through. One cell dies, then the next.
We were demonstrating that the authorities needed more data, because if they steered the industry toward fuel tank requirements, it was wrong. They stepped back for a period to gather data. NASA was doing a lot of work, so they pulled data from there. Companies like Vertical, Lilium, and H55 then started saying, let us show you how these things behave, and let that steer the regulation.
That became reasonably successful. A company earns a lot of respect with the authorities when it can bring them in, show them that it understands the technology, and help shape the regulation. It’s a really interesting partnership.
That initial conversation at Airbus also opened the door to understanding that it was a negotiation, a discussion. The authorities were not an all-knowing oracle that you can’t challenge. The confidence to ask why, to push for the understanding under the surface, to ask why treat it like a fuel tank? And then the curiosity to understand what it actually behaves like. That was pretty inspirational for me.
What’s your take on the current state of play between aircraft certification and ground infrastructure for electric aviation?
There are two types of electric aircraft: conventional and vertical. Both can leverage existing infrastructure. You can take off from a conventional airport or a conventional helipad. So from a physical ground perspective, it’s there. The challenge is getting electrical power to those locations.
If you’re at a really large airport like Heathrow, there’s a lot of electrical power, but the ability to operate as a small aircraft is pretty diminished. It’s set up for heavy passenger use. At the airports where you could use these aircraft, take Nottingham as an example, there’s no power. So it’s a really big challenge.
There was also a white paper written by Uber Elevate, the division that was later bought by Joby, pushing that the business case needed a turnaround time of seven minutes for vertical takeoff aircraft. That’s really hard. To land, let the air turbulence subside, charge, turn over passengers within seven minutes and dispatch. I don’t think that’s going to be possible for a long time, but that’s what the eVTOL business case was initially built on.
So there are two challenges. Firstly, you need electrical power, and these aircraft need a lot of it. To give a comparison, the centre of Coventry probably uses about 10 megawatts in totality. You need probably two megawatts to charge one of these aircraft. So you’d have to double the power available in a city centre just to have five aircraft flying in and out. That’s a big ask.
On top of that, there was a push for VTOL aircraft to fly in and out of city centres from rooftops. So not only does the power need to be available in an urban environment, it needs to be available at the top of a building. I didn’t buy that. I found it very hard to believe.
What drew you to Urban Airport specifically, and what about Beta’s approach?
That led into two directions. Urban Airport have secured a patent around managing downwash and outwash, which is a real limitation if you’re trying to turn aircraft around. You need still air for people to access and egress the vehicle, and to manage the impact on other incoming and outgoing aircraft. If you’ve got two aircraft taking off near each other and want to maximise the space, you need to minimise the downwash and outwash.
But the power side is really hard to resolve. It’s the same with electric cars. Effort has gone in, but I’m pretty sure if you drove from London to Edinburgh you’d have trouble finding an available charging station. That’s still an open problem.
One of the reasons I moved to Beta was that I really believe in the company strategy: electrical conventional aircraft first, and build out the ground infrastructure with chargers. We’re at about 56 to 58 chargers on the east coast of the US, and the aim is to double that this year, so you can fly north to south, east to west completely on the Beta charging network.
But it’s expensive, and at some point you hit impact on the electrical grid. I think the ultimate challenge that will enable the electric era is government policy focusing on establishing a national grid perspective for electric aircraft, because it takes so much more power than cars. eVTOL companies are basing their business cases on hundreds of aircraft manufactured and delivered per year. You have to be able to charge hundreds of aircraft to make that viable. That’s the hurdle.
What I got from Urban Airport was access to understanding how aircraft operate on the ground, the reality of how people will use these aircraft, and what’s needed to make the ground infrastructure work. And they’re also great people, which always helps.
Should every engineer learn about finance?
I think if you want to be a good engineer, you have to understand the finance side. A lot of what I’m doing at Beta is productionising a prototype design. When you design a prototype, you don’t really care about cost or how it’s manufactured. You’re demonstrating performance, saying yes, this technology will work. But when you’ve done that, you don’t have a product you can sell. You’ve got a product optimised around one parameter: performance.
The only way to have a business is to make it at a price point that gives you a profit, in a timescale that brings a reasonable return on investment. If you don’t understand some of the economics around your work, I don’t know how you can produce a properly compromised product. And compromised is the right word, because you have to balance performance, price point, manufacturing timescale, and field maintainability. It’s a real balancing act. Understanding the finance is super important.
It doesn’t mean you need to understand a P&L balance sheet. But knowing that if you want to reduce the price of an electric motor, machining from aluminium isn’t going to work at a thousand units a year. You might want to go to forging. But if you’re only manufacturing ten a year, forging doesn’t make sense and you stick with machining. That steers the whole design activity. You need to understand the economics to make that decision and that trade.
I’ve also found that the technician’s view often isn’t considered in design. Probably because I have that background, I question designs by asking, can you actually maintain that in the field? If there’s damage to your aircraft or you have a flat tyre in the middle of nowhere, how do you manage that? That’s a very different perspective from manufacturing it in a nice clean production facility for the first build.
What’s your take on AI in regulated industries?
I think we’re at the very beginning of what AI is going to do to us all, from a work perspective and a life perspective. The view that you ask a question, sit back and get the perfect answer: maybe that happens at some point in the future, but it’s definitely not a now event. You can get some really nice results out of an AI platform, but you don’t always get nice results. And one of the keys is that you don’t know where those results have come from.
When I look at the regulators, you have to have full traceability from the initial question through to the final answer. The regulation is that initial question, and then you’ve got a whole host of documents that you draw on to steer your design, validate it, give you guidance, verify it, test it, and then ultimately say, I’ve met that regulation. If you don’t have that full traceability, it’s really hard.
That’s what I set up Xcert.ai to do: to utilise the large language model part of AI to translate regulation, but keep track of that traceability all the way through. Because where AI is at the moment, it can easily get confused, watered down, or steered by incorrect information, and no regulator is going to accept that.
I think there’s a future where AI becomes more and more capable. But where it is right now, it’s not trusted. You build trust by demonstrating your data connection from a regulator’s perspective, and you can’t do that yet. If you jump on ChatGPT, Claude, or any of these platforms, ask a question and ask for source information, it really struggles. That’s a hurdle that needs to be overcome before AI is really viable in regulated industries.
Taking a proposal to a regulator or an aircraft company and showing that you can generate new things using an AI agent while maintaining full traceability: that’s the test. If you can do that, then AI starts to become interesting for regulators and for aerospace companies.
What advice would you give young people looking at a career in aerospace?
Part of it is what’s available in your area, in your location. There isn’t always the plethora of choice you might want.
But assuming you have choice, picking something you care about and are interested in is, for me, one of the biggest things. I was really passionate about aviation and really capable practically, so it was obvious for me. Most everything that happened after that was curiosity-led, looking to be better, looking to understand more. I think that can be one of the strongest parts of career development.
Starting with something that means something to you personally is a really powerful thing. Working in an industry or at a job that you’re not fully committed to, I don’t know how anybody does that. So I would always give that guidance: pick something you’re good at, that you care about, and that provides you with purpose.
What could the IET do to support the next generation of engineers?
Two things I’d want to share. First, I think universities are very structured in how they educate engineering. You’re a mechanical engineer, a systems engineer, an electrical engineer. But where I find the most interesting things happen is when those disciplines are all connected together.
The majority of issues I see that we need to solve, take the battery for instance, involve a thermal challenge, an electromagnetic challenge when you talk about EMI on an aircraft, an electrochemical challenge, a packaging and mechanical challenge, and a high-voltage electrical challenge. It’s really hard to find people who can understand the trade-offs between those different engineering disciplines. Anything that can help move outside of singular focused subjects, from education and from a project perspective, would go a long way.
Designing something mechanically, you can read a book and understand a lot of it. But designing something in an environment, at a temperature, with properties that aren’t mechanical, maybe it needs to conduct electricity or heat, that suddenly falls outside the wheelhouse of most university programmes.
Second, I think engineers are inspired before they become engineers. My inspiration was being a kid in my garden staring at these crazy flying things. That inspiration doesn’t happen when you’re 20. That’s when careers start, not when inspiration is born. Going and doing early STEM work with infants, with primary-aged children, that’s when passion for engineering is at its highest. That’s when the magic of what humans can create is really at its embryonic stage, for kids to be inspired for life.
So it would be those two things: more early-age STEM, and at university, that cross-pollination between different subjects.
Lawrence Blakeley is VP Engineering at Beta Technologies, with previous roles at Vertical Aerospace, H55, and Airbus. He is also involved with Urban Airport and Xcert.ai. This interview was conducted by Alex Brooker for the IET Aerospace Technical Network.