The founding insight behind Prime Propulsion came from seeing both sides of the certification process over an entire career.

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At Pratt & Whitney, the engineering challenges were complex — but the institutional resources were deep. Large OEMs have internal DER networks, regulatory affairs teams, and decades of FAA relationships built into their organization. Certification, while difficult, is never done alone.

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At the FAA, those same submission packages arrived from the other side of the table. It became clear that the quality of engineering data and the way it was framed and organized made an enormous difference in how smoothly a program moved through review — and how often it stalled.

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At the U.S. Air Force, serving as a propulsion Subject Matter Expert on an ACAT 1D major defense acquisition program meant being the technical authority the contractor team had to satisfy. That experience made one thing unmistakable: the gap between what government program offices require and what contractors actually submit is almost always a documentation and framing problem — not an engineering problem.

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Prime Propulsion was founded to close that gap — specifically for small and mid-size aerospace manufacturers and MRO operators who have strong engineering but lack the in-house certification infrastructure to package and present it the way the FAA and defense program offices require. Our services include FAA PMA certification, STC consulting, test cell correlation, repair specifications, and defense propulsion consulting.

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Every client gets direct access to a DER who has been on both sides — government and industry — and who has spent a career in propulsion specifically. That's not a credential we borrowed. It's the foundation the firm was built on.