By Karen Di Piazza
Dallas Ft. Worth
Aviation & Business Journal
“I am sort of a novelty – both as a female CEO who is actively flying and racing planes, and as a female CEO of an aircraft original equipment manufacturer,” she said. Mooney Airplane Company CEO Gretchen Jahn is the first female to be elected as a CEO of an aircraft manufacturer. She’s also the first female to do so coming from outside of the aviation industry.
Breaking the metaphoric glass ceiling, particularly in aviation, where it has been a male-dominated industry, is a triumph for Jahn – and for her mother, too, as her dream for Jahn was to become a “great corporate wife.” Overseeing Mooney, though, is far from her first CEO post is which she’s turned out to be a great corporate leader.
Jahn is a people person, so she discovered the world of human behavior and psychology. She attended Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, becoming a cum laude graduate and getting a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She later attended the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, and obtained her master’s in experimental psychology.
“Experimental psychology is about human memory learning and language – how people learn,” says Jahn. “Understanding how people learn has helped me in my career.”
She also obtained her certificate in integrated resource management from the American production and Inventory Control Society.
“This has been an interesting life journey,” she said. “In my opinion, there are two different ways to make your path in the world. There are those people who really know what it is that they want, and they spend their life pursuing that; the road may not be completely straight, but they have a clear vision of who they want to be, what they want to do, where they want to go and they do what they can to get there.”
“Then, there are folks like me; there isn’t an end goal that looks like that. Instead, it’s been a personal discovery of my own interests and capabilities – pursuing the interests and honing the capabilities as an offer to those around me – to friends, employers and to groups that I belong to.”
Jahn said she’s evaluated what she’s good at and has come to a conclusion: she’s good at what she likes.
“I’ve packaged that into a particular career pursuit, which comes into play with the love of manufacturing, the love of aviation, systems, business, and people as a whole,” she says. Jahn says she’s good at “organizing people, working with people and motivating people.” She believes those qualities make her a good CEO. She’s always thinking about problems and asking questions, which she explained provokes a different kind of thinking process to solve problems faster.
”Guiding someone is to help them achieve their direction, but as a CEO leading is setting the direction, so, you’re working with folks to go in the direction in which you’re leading,”‘ she explained. “To lead, you have to show the example; you have to be willing to provide energy.”
Jahn says she encourages people to come to her with questions, especially if they’re having difficulty getting results on something.
Jahn has taken the aviation industry by surprise. That’s an understatement, though, of where’s she’s taken Mooney. Before she arrived at Mooney in November 2004, replacing J. Nelson Happy, no one was very happy; employee count was down to 145 and aircraft deliveries for that year had sunk to 36. There was also talk of filing bankruptcy again – closing the doors for good.
Under Jahn’s leadership, aircraft deliveries in 2005 more than doubled, to 85, so it was no surprise when Jahn also became president and CEO of Mooney’s parent company, Mooney Aerospace Group, Ltd., a publicly traded company, on July 21, 2005.
In Mooney’s past, management was unable to overcome the challenges of the day, however, Jahn has no problem in that area. She applied clean-up principles to aircraft manufacturing: to sort, organize, clean up, have a positive state of mind and hove discipline. In doing so, Mooney reduced costs because it didn’t take as long to get something done, and waste overall was reduced. “Although the company has seen tremendous growth and we’ve come a long way, we still have a ways to go,” she noted. And she has big plans to take the company to new horizons.
Jahn has held varied executive positions in business and with her experience in processes and productivity, spanning from manufacturing and service firms to metal fabrication, meat packing and pacemakers, she’s proven she knows how to lead and get results.
“In terms of being a private pilot, I’ve never looked back, but I never incorporated it into my work life until recently,” she says. “So that’s a real novelty in this industry. The only other female CEO of a manufacturer today is June Maule of Maule Air, Inc., but that’s because her husband, Belford D. Maule, died. The same thing held true for Moya Lear and Olive Ann Beech, who bath took over as CEO after their husbands, respectively, Bill Lear and Walter H. Beech, died. So, I’m the only one that’s come in from the outside! And I don’t know of any other CEO who races airplanes.”
Virtually all women of achievement in aviation have been or are members of The Ninety-Nines – a nonprofit international organization of licensed women pilots. Jahn joined this elite group, unwittingly, through her husband’s encouragement to learn how to fly in 1985. “My husband, Karl Sutterfield, tried to teach me how to fly,” she smiled. “I learned how to navigate and read the charts, and I could tune the radios. I could do everything except actually take off and land! Karl was flying before me, and he kept encouraging me to get my license, and my response had always been, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ But then he was gone on a three-week trip. By the time he came back, I had chosen an instructor; several lessons later I was hooked!”
After she obtained her license, her first experience with the 99s wasn’t racing. She was put in charge of timing races at the finish line, at the lower in Sonia Fe, N.M. “I had a ball; I watched these airplanes zooming down the runway, down the finish line, and I said, ‘I need to do that!’ I was really hooked then,” she said.
A handicap speed race is a way of having slow and fast airplanes compete against each other in the same race, she explained.
“Each airplane is assigned a handicap based on the make and model of the airplane, and then your times are compared to your handicap,” she said. “Whoever does the best against the handicap wins. Now I compete in the 99s Air Race Classic, which is on all-women’s four day (transcontinental) race.”
She describes the Air Race Classic as “the spiritual successor to the Powder Puff Derby.” Also called the Women’s Air Derby, the event took root on Sunday, Aug. 19, 1929, when 20 brave female pilots planned and executed the world’s first women’s cross-country airplane race. The racers took off from Santa Monica, California. Seven days later, the raced ended in Cleveland, Ohio.
This year, for the Air Race Classic, Jahn and the other female pilots started in Mesa, Arizona, on June 20. After several race stops in many parts of Texas and the Midwest, the race concluded June 23 in Menominee, Michigan. Jahn and her racing partner, Carol Foy, took first place in this year’s race.
“I am really hooked on aviation and equally hooked on Mooney.” Jahn said. She said she’d continue to race airplanes; that’s become a real passion for her. And whenever she gets the chance, she and her husband will fly off to some desolate place – enjoying nature, to keep a balance in her mind and soul.
(Permission to print from Dallas/Ft. Worth Aviation & Business journal, September 2006; condensed version.)
EDITOR NOTE: Gretchen Jahn resigned from Mooney on October 1, 2006, but she is remaining with the company as an advisor to oversee the (235-plus knot turbo) Acclaim certification.
