Pete Bunce retired in April after leading the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) as president and CEO for 20 years. His GAMA service capped an illustrious career that included 26 years with the U.S. Air Force, where he flew F-15s and A-10s. His last assignment was as the director of the Air Force Congressional Budget and Appropriations liaison. While at GAMA, the association expanded its international reach with an office added in Brussels, as well as its scope with new categories of members. He also played instrumental roles in countless pressing issues, from user fees to certification reforms. He spoke with AIN about his time with the association.

Q. Talk about how GAMA has grown over the past couple of decades. Did GAMA yet permit international members when you came on board?

A. Yeah, they had instituted that just before I came on board. When I came to GAMA, we did have Dassault as a member and of course, Pratt & Whitney Canada, maybe Piaggio and TBM. There weren’t very many. But we only had a little more than 40 members. I am proud that GAMA tripled in size since then, despite all the consolidation.

Q. What were some of the major changes that occurred at GAMA as the industry evolved?

A. One of the first things I instituted when I came on board was a Capitol Hill day. I had seen the value of that from my Air Force days, where we’d bring in the wing commanders and spend the day up on the hill, taking them around to their members in the House and Senate. It was really successful. It built personal relationships. [GAMA’s] members are employers, so I knew that just like a wing commander, they’re going to get the meeting with the principal. It allows the members to get a sense that they’re important in the process. Association staff can talk until we’re blue in the face as the technical experts, but when you have the company members, especially at GAMA, the folks on the hill listen to them.

Then, the next major thing that I saw was the fact that the EASA was growing. EASA was relatively new when I came on board. But it was growing in prominence, and in particular, it was growing in international regulatory outreach. I said we have to get more involved in Europe. It wasn’t just because of the influence that EASA had within Europe, but also globally. I talked to Greg Bowles [former v-p of global innovation and policy who is now head of government affairs at Joby Aviation], and he said, “You’re going to go over for a three-year tour.” That was extremely important for us to establish our foothold in Brussels. That turned out to be successful.

Q. How did membership change during this time?

A. We brought on large MRO companies. Jet Aviation approached me first, wanting to be a member. They were not part of General Dynamics at the time. And then StandardAero and Duncan Aviation—all of the big MRO companies came on board. 

And then, I focused on helicopters. Just the technology that we were putting in the cockpit and the capabilities that we’re building into them made it very important to be able to keep growing the association on the rotorcraft side. Bell was the first one; John Garrison, who was at Bell at this time [as former president and CEO], came to us and said, “We think this would be a smart move for us.” That’s been very rewarding because the helicopter companies have figured out what they were missing by not working together on both sides of the Atlantic for regulatory purposes. So that’s been a really interesting expansion for GAMA.

I think over that period of time, because we’ve grown GAMA and because we’ve been around working in Brussels, Cologne, and Washington, our influence has grown. Especially with the capability of the GAMA staff. Each one of their expertise has grown, and they have become the people with the most expertise on so many different areas.

Q. Was it difficult to convince your members who have been there for decades to expand GAMA’s reach to MROs and helicopters?

A. No, surprisingly enough. I laid it out for them where I saw the advantages, and they accepted it. They figured out that there was great value in it. When I laid out the case for having a place where these advanced air mobility [AAM] companies could be housed [through its Electric Propulsion and Innovation Committee (EPIC) formed in 2015], that probably was the biggest change. With the MRO companies, each one of our major players in the business aviation market had an MRO function anyway. So they had an instant connection, as did our avionics companies and our engine companies to the helicopter world. That wasn’t that difficult. They all understood when I laid it out, the importance of it.

I think in my whole time at GAMA, we only adjusted dues twice, and they were very minimal adjustments. We’ve handled all of that through the growth of the companies. But when I made the case for AAM and how we would bring them in before they were certified, that’s when I kind of got that skeptical eye—you know, “What do you want to do? You want to establish a very inexpensive membership so they can all be together?” And I said, “Let’s think of it this way. If we get them all working together through the EPIC committee, it doesn’t take away from anything that GAMA’s doing. Ultimately, if we’re successful in AAM, these companies are going to provide business for all the traditional manufacturers.” When I laid that all out, they agreed to it. It’s pretty cool to see that in 2015, there were 11 companies, and now it’s our biggest committee. Virtually every GAMA member is in that committee. That’s been fun to watch.

Q. Were you surprised how that committee ballooned?

A. I wasn’t surprised at how quickly it grew. I was mainly surprised at how quickly these AAM companies were proactive in collaborating. All of these companies have very proprietary information and great concepts. But it took them a little while to see the value of working together, because it wasn’t in their DNA to work with their competitors. But once they saw the value of it, that’s when I was surprised at how quickly they turned around and saw there is true benefit for them to be able to work together as a collective body. That’s been gratifying.

Q. How have you seen the industry mature on Wall Street?

A. When somebody pays for a high-end Bombardier, Gulfstream, or Textron Aviation business jet, there are so many multiplying factors of the influence of those dollars that are put down, whether it’s with the brokers that do the deal with completion facilities or the FBOs that house them—all of that. It’s not surprising that you have a lot of these investment firms that want to get in this business because they see that somebody spends $90 million on an aircraft, they’re going to want it maintained very well and housed, it just keeps going on and on. I think people that are on Wall Street look at this and say it’s an amazing industry.

Q. At the same time, have you seen the industry maintain its sense of community?

A. That’s something that we have tried to foster. These guys compete very robustly out in the marketplace. But they compete honorably. And when they get into a GAMA meeting, they’re friends, and they recognize each other’s expertise. They joke with one another. I always said I have the best association job in the world because I get to be around these captains of industry, and we have a good time. I try to make it fun with some of the crazy stuff we do at our board meetings, like the games that we play. I think that fosters a lot. A lot of the spouses have become friends with one another through this process, which has also been cool to see.

Q. Does that kind of collaboration help with safety and innovation?

A. Unquestionably. At our board meetings, we do tech talks, whether we do a panel or one person talking about things such as automation and fly-by-wire. We have our avionics companies come in, like Garmin, to explain what the logic is behind Autoland. They share their safety technology expertise. It’s something. I am very proud of that. It’s different than the car companies. We don’t compete with each other on safety. We help each other with safety initiatives. That’s a cool thing to see.

Q. While there have been good times, talk a little about some of the tough battles you’ve faced, such as the financial downfall in the late 2000s.

A. That was a very concerning time. We were going into the Great Recession. The economy was roaring, and we had people flipping airplane positions right and left. It was a crazy marketplace. Supply chain wasn’t a major issue at the time. We had just-in-time maintenance capability with parts and pieces. It was kind of the go-go days. And then it came crashing down. I remember being at NBAA in 2008, and the market was just cratering. I mean, just cratering. Everybody there went, ‘Oh my God.’ We had this huge ramp-up in production capability and personnel; then, all of a sudden, we had a couple of years of major painful layoffs. And when you have to lay off your workforce, not only is it devastating for them, but it’s devastating for the companies. Leaders have to lay off these people and watch their expertise walk out the door. The worry about how they are going to rebuild. It’s very dramatic for people.

And then we had the auto execs come to town, and we have all of this craziness up on Capitol Hill wanting to punish the industry. I always say some of our biggest successes are bad things that didn’t happen. That was one of them, working on the Hill to try to defeat some initiatives that would’ve really penalized our industry.

There have been other things like the small aircraft security program, where you weren’t even going to be able to carry things like golf clubs onboard the aircraft out of fear that somebody could bludgeon somebody with them. I mean, that was a major, major fight.

Then came the pandemic. We sent everybody home and then the government says now essential personnel need to come back. We had to figure out how we wanted to come back, how we would do that. I remember some of our companies were making ventilators for the first month, and all of a sudden, everybody saw that business aviation was, in fact, having an uptick because that was a secure way for people to travel from a health standpoint. All of a sudden, we have to keep producing aircraft despite our supply chain collapsing at the time. They shared their practices. Our companies figured out glass partitions between workstations. If one company found a source of semiconductors somewhere, they shared it with other companies. What industry does that? But it was all, “Hey, we’ve got to keep this thing going.” It was challenging yet gratifying from a standpoint of the quality of the leaders of our companies.

And then, of course, with the Max [crashes] and the terrible things talked about at Capitol Hill that would have really hurt this industry. We were able to have everybody step back and say we had a safety management system program for manufacturers that’s been sitting on the shelf at the FAA or DOT. We went to the Hill and said we’d done the work already. We can get this done quickly. Don’t come up with these crazy ideas because there are not enough people in the FAA to regulate the industry the way they were talking about. We need safety management systems, and we need the rule to be published. And the Congress listened to us. When it was all said and done, they looked at the industry and said, “Yep, we should have had an SMS program in place for manufacturers, and that’s what we want you to do,” and they moved forward in that.

Then, even with the door blowout incident that happened, to educate the Congress that certification and production are not the same and they’re not the same people at the FAA that oversee one versus the other. All of a sudden, they wanted to point back [to the Max crashes]. But production is a totally different thing. They’re the quality systems, and it’s a different set of regulators that look at those processes. It took a lot to be able to educate people up on the Hill, but also people even at the FAA that should have known the differences. It was another very interesting time of trying to work those issues.

Q. Another issue that seems to be ever-present is user fees/privatization.

A. Right. And especially in this current period of trying to get the government out of certain functions. But what I have been very happy about is listening to the rhetoric that’s coming out of the administration and what we anticipate to see from Transportation Secretary [Sean] Duffy. There isn’t a whole lot of appetite for privatizing the system. It is getting enough controllers out there and then giving them the technology they need to do their job better. That’s exactly where we all want to go. And also—thanks to the great work from Paul Feldman on the GAMA staff and Sharon Pinkerton on the Airlines for America staff—no one in industry wants to see a privatization fight because they know it would be a fight that’s going to consume all the air in the room for several years, and we would not get anywhere at tackling the problems that need to be tackled. In my 20 years, I have never seen the industry so aligned as it is right now. I hope that the Congress and the administration recognize the power of that, of all of these associations on the same page.

Q What is still keeping you up? What do you see in the future that might be the challenges? Or maybe on the flip side, what are you walking away from that you’re proud of and you see going well?

A. Well, I’ll start with that last one first. What I'm most proud of is the fact that I’m leaving Jim Viola with the best staff that you could ever ask for taking over an association. They are just phenomenal, and I feel confident that they’ll just keep charging the way they have been. I’m also proud that we have a very supportive board. You couldn’t ask for a better board.

My concerns, starting in Europe, really lie in this anti-business jet mindset that they have. Like the taxes in France, they’re not going back into aviation. It’s not even trying to disguise it as green. It’s just a pure tax for them to raise revenue. Why aren't they taxing all the yachts that sit at Nice and on the Mediterranean coast? With a business jet, at least people use it for business purposes. A yacht burns an incredible amount of diesel fuel. I don’t see that people do a whole lot of business on yachts. It’s discriminatory, and it’s crazy.

And then the lack of the embrace by the European Commission on book-and-claim concerns me. We’ve got to get the European Commission to understand that if you’re going to make sustainable aviation fuel something that’s used, you need to encourage people to use it. You have to allow it to be available at not just the big commercial hubs.

We’ve got to keep in mind that the public over there—the movable middle is what we call it in there—they’re skeptical. You’ve got a lot of people in the middle who look at it from a more balanced standpoint. So, we’ve got to keep our outreach going to them. And then, I’m very concerned about the tariffs in the U.S. triggering retaliatory tariffs by the Canadians, the Mexicans, and the Europeans. I just cannot see anything good that’s going to come out of this. It will hurt the industry.

The supply chain’s not getting any better. I haven’t seen a whole lot of change in suppliers. A lot of it has to do with a lot of the mom and pops have gotten out of the business. It’s easier to supply to other industries than it is to aviation because there is many more rules to it.

I’m concerned about the FAA. It does bother me that instead of focusing on improving and keeping pace with all the changes, the FAA seems to look at things that don’t need to be changed. One example is the FAA promised not to use ADS-B for enforcement. Now they’ve decided to do that. They’ve reneged on a promise they made to the industry, and what’s that causing? People are pulling the circuit breaker on their ADS-B now. That’s counter to safety.

Then there’s another part that’s really concerning me, especially after the DCA crash, that they’re not providing the continuation of the waivers out in Hawaii, and they’re trying to push the helicopter traffic up at the same altitudes that all the VFR aircraft transit underneath the clouds. It’s just insane.

It’s bureaucracy, it’s a loss of expertise, and it’s the fact that they weren’t working and collaborating together. But then it’s also that they don’t listen to industry on commonsense things that should apply to safety that they’re not listening to. This one out in Hawaii absolutely baffles me. There’s no justification. Somebody said it’s probably a disguise for noise abatement, but it actually will increase noise because these helicopters flew out over the water, and now they’re going to be pushed up.

Q. What’s ahead for Pete Bunce?

 A. Giving back to [my wife] Patty for everything she’s given me and spending my time with her, but also spending my time with my son, who was injured pretty badly in Iraq. I’m going to fly a lot and instruct—go back to basics there. I’m going to serve on some boards but go back to Wisconsin

Q. What’s ahead for [new GAMA president and CEO] Jim Viola?

A. All the challenges on his plate that I mentioned are significant. He has got his hands full.