NBAA’s John P. “Jack” Doswell Award honors an individual for lifelong achievement in support of the aims, goals and objectives of business aviation. It is not awarded every year, but only when a deserving candidate is identified. This year the “more-than-deserving candidate” for the Doswell award is Bill de Decker, now chairman and majority owner of Conklin and de Decker, an aviation research and consulting firm based in Arlington, Texas.
“I was absolutely flabbergasted when I heard I would receive this award,” de Decker told AIN. “I got to know Jack Doswell in 1976 or ’77, when he was recovering from Guillain-Barré syndrome, which left him with limited use of his hands and feet.” Doswell had been diagnosed with the syndrome, a disorder of the immune system, in 1973. “I was at FlightSafety,” de Decker recalled, “and Jack was getting some simulator time to get his licenses back. Over several months he just got better and better. It was remarkable.” The FAA eventually did give Doswell his certificate back and he continued to fly. “Jack was a real inspiration to me,” de Decker said, “so to get the award named after him is a real honor.”
A native of the Netherlands, de Decker came to the U.S. in 1956, where he first lived in Montclair, N.J. He earned his bachelor of science degree in aerospace engineering in 1964 and his master’s degree in transportation economics in 1967, both from Princeton University. But his aerospace career began before he finished his bachelor’s degree, when in 1962 he took a job at North American Aviation in Los Angeles, thinking he would work on the XB-70 bomber program. But that program was canceled right before he got there and then, he said, “I was offered the privilege of working on the Apollo program right after it got awarded. It was the best job any engineer right out of school could ever have.”
After two years with North American, de Decker went back to college, finished his bachelor’s degree and joined Boeing’s helicopter division in Philadelphia in June 1964, initially concentrating on preliminary design. He took a leave of absence in 1965 to get his master’s degree. When he returned to Boeing, he became more involved in the costing aspects of preliminary design. He also did market research, sales engineering and computer programming. Among the helicopter programs he worked on were the predecessor to the V-22 military tiltrotor and introduction of the MBB BO 105 light twin-engine helicopter in the U.S.
Birth of the Aircraft Cost Evaluator
In 1970, de Decker joined Dassault Falcon Jet in Teterboro, N.J., where he focused on the sale of new and used aircraft, established a training program to transition pilots to jets, ran the international marketing department and supervised the sales engineering and market research department.
It was at Falcon Jet where de Decker met Al Conklin in 1970. “Over lunch one day we were bemoaning the fact that there wasn’t any good data on business aircraft–all eight of them,” de Decker told AIN. “Al, who always liked numbers, said he had data, which he had been collecting for years, and he asked me if I knew of a good format.” De Decker said he did, “a really good one, the same format we used at Boeing. So I put a prototype together using Microsoft Excel. We showed it around at Falcon and people liked it. So we started publishing what became known as the ‘Aircraft Cost Evaluator’ as a Falcon Jet document.”
De Decker took a job at FlightSafety International in 1976, where he worked in managerial positions at the training provider’s Falcon learning center in Teterboro for three years and then at its Bell learning center in Fort Worth, Texas, which was a start-up operation. His main responsibilities included overall management, financial management, marketing, new program development and general supervision. The Falcon Center, one of the largest in the company, trained more than 2,000 pilots and technicians a year during the time de Decker was there.
While de Decker was at the FlightSafety Bell learning center, the company bought a software development firm in Fort Worth. “At that time [1982] the quality of our training materials varied widely because it was done by the individual simulator instructors,” de Decker explained. “So Al Ueltschi [founder and then president of FlightSafety] put me in charge of FlightSafety’s courseware support division. It was privilege to work for him, because he had tremendous insight into what business is all about, what works and doesn’t work. Probably the most important thing I learned from him is ‘take care of your customers.’”
Conklin and de Decker Formed
Back in Teterboro, Conklin retired from Falcon Jet in 1984. “It had become clear that the Aircraft Cost Evaluator would be more effective if it were an independently published set of numbers, instead of having the Falcon Jet logo on it,” explained de Decker. “So Al made a deal with Falcon, which released the copyright to him.” Conklin founded Al Conklin Associates to offer the Aircraft Cost Evaluator to the business aviation market that same year.
The two former Falcon coworkers had kept in touch since de Decker had left Falcon Jet. At the 1986 NBAA Convention, Conklin told de Decker he needed help, because he didn’t know computers very well and knew nothing about helicopters. Conklin was well aware that de Decker had a computer background and knew about helicopters from his time at Boeing. “I was in senior management at FlightSafety in 1986, with a good salary and benefits,” de Decker recalled. “I told Al this, implying the question, ‘What are you going to pay me?’ And Al said, ‘Well, I can’t match any of that, but I can do three things for you: one, I’ll split the profits with you; two, I’ll sell you the company, if it works out; and three, we’ll have a lot of fun.’” De Decker said he’d consider the offer.
“Two years later it sounded like a heck of a deal,” he said. “My wife agreed and Al still wanted to do it, so we joined forces and formed a new company [Conklin & de Decker], which began officially on October 1, 1989.” De Decker served as president of the firm from 1989 to 2012. In 1998, the two men wrote and published the book Aircraft Acquisition Planning. Conklin, who was 20 years older than de Decker, passed away in 2006.
De Decker and his wife still live in the house they bought in Arlington when he started working at the Bell learning center. He is still working, although the couple has “sold just short of half of the company” to his three successors, Brandon Battles, David Wyndham and Nel Stubbs. “I’ve stepped back and let them do the day-to-day running of the company, which they do very well,” he said.
De Decker now focuses on consulting with about a dozen clients and improving and expanding Conklin & de Decker’s Lifecycle Cost Analysis software, which he developed more than 20 years ago. “As far as I know, there are only two aircraft lifecyle cost programs that are available–one belongs to the Department of Defense and the other is ours,” he said proudly.
