Bizav Leader Champions ‘Employee-Centric’ Management Style

Stephen Mitchell, CAM, senior director of aviation and chief pilot at Rheem Manufacturing, has built a Part 91 corporate flight department from the ground up by systematically recruiting low-hour pilots into administrative roles and developing them into professional cockpit crew over a multi-year timeline. Since Rheem launched its flight operation in 2018 with a single Dassault Falcon 2000, Mitchell's department has grown to a team of ten, two Falcon jets — including an 8X operating heavily in international markets — and an annual flight program that logged over 700 combined hours in 2025. Two of the operation's current copilots, Joseph Taylor and Brian Hearn, entered the department as schedulers with under 300 hours each; both are projected to upgrade to captain by 2028. Mitchell describes this approach as "employee-centric management," a philosophy that prioritizes passion and work ethic over credential stacking at the point of hire, then invests heavily in training, license acquisition, and structured mentorship to build the pipeline from within.

The operational framework undergirding Mitchell's talent model is notable for its deliberate use of industry credentialing and safety standards as cultural anchors. Rheem's flight department built its safety program around IS-BAO registration — selected in part because international recognition aligned with the company's plan to eventually operate the 8X across Europe, Latin America, and beyond. Mitchell simultaneously pursued NBAA's Certified Aviation Manager credential and encouraged director of maintenance Justin Beason, CAM, to do the same, framing the CAM not merely as a personal achievement but as a shared professional language that builds trust with non-aviation executives. This dual investment in IS-BAO and CAM reflects a management posture that treats operational safety and professional credibility as inseparable, a philosophy that gained particular traction when COVID arrived in 2020 — just as the department had completed its foundational infrastructure — and forced Mitchell and Beason to make retention and internal development decisions under significant external pressure.

For working pilots and flight department managers, the Rheem model surfaces an actionable response to one of the most persistent structural problems in business aviation: the pilot pipeline. Major airline hiring surges throughout the early 2020s drained the regional and bizav labor pools, driving up compensation demands and making mid-career lateral hires more expensive and less predictable. Mitchell's approach sidesteps that competition by recruiting before candidates are commercially attractive to the airlines, then building loyalty through mentorship, progressive responsibility, and company-funded training. The result — copilots who have grown up inside the operation's SMS culture, know the customer base, and have institutional knowledge baked in — is arguably more valuable to a Part 91 corporate operator than an experienced hire who arrives with type ratings but without cultural fit. Beason's own trajectory, a 20-year maintenance career that now includes a CAM, a pending MBA, and plans for a multi-engine commercial certificate by end of 2026, further illustrates how Mitchell's philosophy flattens traditional departmental silos.

The Rheem case also fits within a broader restructuring of how corporate flight departments define and justify value to executive leadership. As noted in NBAA's own analysis of shifting bizav leadership dynamics, the retirement of long-tenured boomer-era chief pilots is accelerating, and the executives replacing them as customers increasingly expect flight department leaders to communicate in business terms rather than aviation jargon. Mitchell's insistence on the CAM credential as a "common language with other managers" directly addresses that expectation, and his articulation of the flight program's ROI — executives flying to 12-plus North American facilities, customer relationship flights on the Falcon 2000 exceeding 500 hours annually, and international market development on the 8X — frames aviation as a revenue and market-share driver rather than a cost center. That framing, increasingly essential for flight department survival at the board level, is itself a leadership competency that traditional seniority-based pilot promotion systems rarely cultivate. Rheem's program represents a template worth studying for any corporate operator navigating succession planning, talent retention, and the persistent challenge of keeping a flight department's value proposition legible to the C-suite.