Dan Boedigheimer Wins 2026 Bombardier Safety Standdown Award at 30th Anniversary Event in Wichita

Bombardier announced that Dan Boedigheimer, Ph.D., is the winner of this year's Bombardier Safety Standdown Award, presented annually to an aviation professional who has shown an uncompromising commitment to enhancing safety throughout their career. He received the honour at a gala dinner on the final night of the three-day Safety Standdown event in Wichita, Kansas, which marked the program's 30th anniversary and brought together more than 400 aviation professionals.

Boedigheimer has more than 30 years in aviation and aerospace. He is a founding partner of Advanced Aircrew Academy, where he is Chief Safety Officer after close to 18 years as CEO. Earlier he was Lead Human Factors Instructor at Convergent Performance LLC and Manager of Aircraft Standards and Training at Flight Options.

He first attended Safety Standdown in 2008 and drew the inspiration for his dissertation from the 2006 event, where he heard Tony Kern's message on the Global War on Error. Four years later, his FAA-sponsored dissertation, Exploring Pilot Reliability Certification and Changing Attitudes on the Reduction of Errors, was published in the Transportation Research Record.

Boedigheimer recently completed his tenure as Chairman of the NBAA Safety Committee. He also serves on the IBAC IS-BAO Standards Board, reviews for the Embry-Riddle Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education and Research, and sits on the board of the Colorado Aviation Network.

Chris Milligan, Vice President, Pre-owned Aircraft Services and Flight Operations at Bombardier, congratulated Boedigheimer on his career and his commitment to Safety Standdown and to promoting aviation safety and professionalism. Boedigheimer said the event had shaped his career and that advancing aviation safety requires going beyond simply meeting the minimums. Bombardier customers operate a fleet of more than 5,200 aircraft, supported by 10 service centres across six countries.

The path behind this award is a useful picture of how safety practice moves in business aviation. An idea heard at a 2006 Safety Standdown session became an FAA-sponsored dissertation, then a published paper, and later fed into committee and standards-board work at NBAA and IBAC. Much of the sector's safety thinking circulates this way, through shared forums and volunteer governance bodies that sit alongside the manufacturers and regulators.

For a manufacturer, hosting a gathering of more than 400 professionals for 30 years ties its brand to that community rather than only to its aircraft. With more than 5,200 Bombardier aircraft in customer fleets, the event reaches operators and crews whose practices shape day-to-day risk, and the award signals which kinds of work, such as human-factors training and error reduction, the host chooses to honour.

The next marker is the program's own calendar: who is named at future Safety Standdown events, and which topics take the stage, will show whether the emphasis on going beyond minimum compliance that Boedigheimer described continues to set the agenda.