These days, Tony still shoulders that responsibility, as one of the co-founders and directors of tlmNexus, a software consultancy, which provides the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) and leading defence primes with the information, know-how and tools they need to ensure that any military aircraft or piece of equipment can be operated safely and reliably, and is available, no matter what the mission. “It's that kind of psyche as a person that we sell our services to,” explains Tony. “Our software solutions provide confidence and assurance to those with responsibility and accountability that they've done the right thing to manage any piece of military equipment so they can get the best out of it safely.” 

Expensive bits of military kit like the RAF's Typhoon fighter jet cost between £70,000 and £90,000 per flying hour, according to the UK Government’s House of Commons Defence Committee in 2011*. With this level of investment, having the information at their fingertips in order to operate the aircraft safely and reliably, in accordance with military airworthiness regulations, is critical for fleet operators and maintainers. Tony only wishes he had access to all the tools his company now provides when he was working as an RAF engineer. It would have made life a lot easier. “We did everything with paper forms, files, memos and telexes,” he says. “When you went to look for information pertaining to the aircraft, it often took time to find it. There were all these information impediments.”

TlmNexus removes those impediments for frontline operators, maintainers, fleet managers and industry. The company was formed from a merger in 2007 between Tony's Through Life Management Solutions, which was borne out of the experience he and fellow co-founder and director David Appleton gained working as RAF engineers and defence reliability consultants, and Brighton-based Nexus Internet Solutions, founded by Andy Stevenson and Sean Walsh, which emerged from the dot-com boom in the early 2000s to develop information systems for the MoD. Tony and Andy originally met while developing an electronic document management system for an MoD aircraft project team in 2004. The rest, as they say, is history.

The technology or software side of tlmNexus' business is based in Brighton, which Andy says gives it access to a large talent pool of free-thinking computer-science graduates from Brighton University, which is a gift for any software company. “We can turn on a sixpence,” says Andy, describing himself as the “civvie” within tlmNexus who is not afraid to challenge customers' thinking when it comes to why they do things a certain way. “One of our customers had an idea for prognostic diagnosis and we turned it round from flash to bang in six to eight weeks in a prototype that looked more Gucci and interesting because of our flexibility, which won hearts and minds,” he says.

Tony and David operate the customer engagement side of the business, drawing on their defence know-how and experience they've gained from years of working as RAF engineers and writing reliability requirements for new pieces of military equipment brought into service. With their combined military and software backgrounds, tlmNexus says it offers customers - which include household names like BAE Systems and Leonardo - a unique perspective. 

“The technical team really do understand defence,” says Andy. Between them, David and Tony have close working relationships with people within the MoD that write the regulations for availability, reliability and safety, those that determine how the regulations are interpreted, and the end users that input the information. “You can't get any more intimate than that as an end-to-end capability,” says David. “We have technical people and engineers who've worked in the environment we're pushing into and who can translate that into a software service that is fit for what our customers want to achieve.”  

In 2007, tlmNexus worked on a project for UK Defence Equipment & Support at Abbey Wood, which got it noticed by some of the biggest names in the military air domain. The project involved automating all the information – any problems or queries from the frontline, changes and modifications to the aircraft, special technical instructions and forms – relating to how the Typhoon fighter jet was maintained.

“We gathered up all of that information, subject by subject over a period in the Typhoon Team and turned their business into electronic forms in Resolve, our main application,” Tony explains. “This gave management teams access and visibility to important information pertaining to the aircraft's safety and reliability, which was previously kept in old files and individual spreadsheets. Nobody else was doing anything like that at the time.” Today, anyone who visits RAF Coningsby or RAF Lossiemouth, where the Typhoon is based, is likely to see tlmNexus's Resolve software running on the information screens fleet managers and operators use to perform their aircraft status catch-ups at the start of every day. Its Resolve software also scored tlmNexus a Queen's Award for Innovation in 2018. 

“Under an expensive bit of military kit is an enormous pyramid of activity where people are pulling together to get that thing flying,” says Andy. “We're one cog in that and quite an important one because if they had to revert to paper and emails, it would be the same as air traffic control at an airport saying the computer systems are down and they have to use pen and paper. A lot of issues to do with the availability of these platforms is based on someone making a decision that it's okay to fly or operate. Speed and reliability of decision-making is critical.”

The importance of the work tlmNexus does in the military sphere was reinforced by a major military air incident, which took place in September 2006 in Afghanistan, when a RAF Nimrod aircraft caught fire due to a fuel leak and crashed, killing all 14 crew members on board. An independent review into broader issues surrounding the crash led by the then QC Charles Haddon-Cave uncovered a poor state of airworthiness management among military air platforms and heavily criticized the air environment's engineering practices, placing the onus on managers to do things better. 

Andy says the problem was the information needed to make a decision about whether the Nimrod was safe to fly or not couldn't be readily accessed at the speed of decision-making required. “High availability and integrity of data is key so you know you've done your job properly,” he explains. “If that information is difficult to obtain, your judgement is impaired, or worse still, you don't make a decision at all. By taking some of the information an operator may have about a particular aircraft and meshing it with information from the supply chain, we give people the confidence to make decisions a lot faster. Can I send the aircraft flying today? Can the pilot safely take off in the aircraft? Do I have a problem with my supplier where there's an endemic issue with quality?” Andy says all decisions are recorded within its software, which gives customers peace of mind. “There has to be an audit trail. Our software allows you to document what you did for posterity, and that traceability of decision-making is available at all times. You've got to get into the mind and walk the floor of the people making these decisions.”