Profile
Darren entered aviation back in 1979 as a 16 year old apprentice with Ansett Airlines until 2003 when he accepted a Quality Manager role with Virgin Blue and formed part of the initial management team tasked with building and operating a new line maintenance company for the airline, Virgin Tech Pty Ltd.
In 2008 Virgin Blue asked Darren to join the airline management team as Maintenance Controller and Head of Aircraft Airworthiness and Maintenance Control as it transitioned to Virgin Australia Airlines.
In 2019 Darren was asked to accept the General Manager Engineering Operations role as the airline commenced resizing of its operations before the impact of Covid-19 forced the significant operational restrictions and the ultimate decision to place the airline into voluntary administration in April 2020. Working vigilantly with the airline administrators Darren’s Engineering team were able to secure the confidence of aircraft lease companies and ensure that the fleet of aircraft remained parked in an enhanced parking program within Australia ready to resume flying on short notice as the administrators worked to gain new ownership and new fleet sizing.
With his broad aviation engineering experience, today Darren directly manages a team of 140 engineering technical staff which oversee the insourcing and outsourcing of around $470M of MRO activities per annum supporting a growing fleet of 83 B737 aircraft.
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