Ad Astra Human Performance was founded by airline pilots and Human Factors professionals, who have decades of experience flying and training Human Factors for large airlines. We recognise that your achievements and successes can be truly remarkable if you utilise your interpersonal skills, individual strengths, and human competencies to the highest level.
Joshua de Maid
An early interest in how we perform and behave as human beings has been crystallised by a career as an airline pilot, with a degree in how to use human factors for enhancing professional development. As part of this process I trained as a Performance coach and a Human Factors Trainer.
I am justifiably proud of our unique programmes and recognise how powerful these training concepts have become in the real world. As a company, we are hugely passionate about establishing powerful and thought-provoking environments that encourage a commitment in workforces to perform to their greatest strengths, while remaining agile and robust.
Our World continues to change around us, but with these concepts we can adapt and develop to get, and remain ahead. It is the motivation and resilience within people that will drive this change towards an exciting and successful future.
Steven Britton
At the heart of Ad Astra lies a number of formative experiences that drive powerful beliefs, shaped by an extensive aviation background and enhanced by a passion for high performance coaching within business and sport, where the focus on strengths, solutions and future success, coupled with the belief in the curiosity, resourcefulness and potential of the individual generate dramatic positive results.
The last 25 years as an airline pilot has seen a revolution in how I work, airlines had to change to improve safety. They found the answer, with the help of NASA, within their people - dramatic safety and performance improvements have occurred.
Our secret is helping you understand your strengths and enhancing your skills, allowing you to be the most productive and effective you have ever been.
Henry Walker
I am one of the earliest members of the Ad Astra Human Performance Team and have been involved in developing the core business. I am also a pilot for one of the UK and Europe’s largest airlines.
I was exposed to the concept of improving how we use our own abilities through learning and awareness, which led me to become qualified in the subject. Further aviation HF specific training followed.
During the Covid-19 pandemic I consulted on a Human Factors training program for junior doctors. This gave me great appreciation of how useful HF can be in every human environment and how aviation's hard-earned lessons could be utilised in other professions.
It has been very rewarding assisting in the development of the Human Factors program at Ad Astra Human performance, and I am delighted seeing the results of these programs take effect.
Peter Bruce
Human Factors has been the most transformative element in my 35 year flying career - it has taken us from nearly 50 hull losses per annum worldwide to virtually none. The simple techniques of HF - driving awareness, staying curious forever and communicating what we learn, to help others avoid our unique human goofs, has been an astonishing journey.
I have always believed that the techniques are universal and should be applied wherever humans operate or interact with equipment, processes or others. The acceptance that we will goof from time to time underlies the methodology of building new processes to cater for the real human world, not the imaginary one where we expect to be perfect.
It has been a joy to fly aeroplanes and helicopters for a living and it is a joy to translate our hard-won lessons into other fields of human endeavour. I am, as you may have guessed, a true believer.
