CPD Standards Office
All programmes are accredited by the CPD Standards Office, the UK's independent CPD accreditation authority. Every course participant receives formal CPD hours on completion.
Ad Astra Human Performance is a London-based, globally-delivered training and consultancy firm. We exist to take the hardest-won body of knowledge in modern industry — aviation's Human Factors science — and make it useful to every organisation that operates at the edge.
Our founding team came out of commercial aviation — captains, training captains, check-and-standards pilots. We had spent our working lives inside a safety system that, quietly, had become the most successful cultural change programme in industrial history.
We kept meeting people in other industries — insurers, surgeons, Premier League coaches, bankers — who were working inside the same problem, and who had never been taught the grammar we used to solve it. So we started teaching it. That was 2009. The programme has been iterated every year since.
We're not consultants who read the book. We are the people who lived it.
All programmes are accredited by the CPD Standards Office, the UK's independent CPD accreditation authority. Every course participant receives formal CPD hours on completion.
Our method draws directly from NASA's Human Factors programme, Cockpit Resource Management, Threat & Error Management, Just Culture, and Matthew Syed's Black Box Thinking.
Programmes delivered in-person and virtually across the UK, Europe, North America and Asia. Clients range from FTSE 250 insurers to Premier League first teams to individual school leadership teams.
Every programme is led by a senior practitioner who has lived the problem in operational life — not a junior trainer reading a deck.
Thirty-five years in the airlines, fifteen of them training. Steven founded Ad Astra to bring the discipline he'd lived with in the cockpit out into industries that needed it as much as aviation but didn't yet have the language for it. His specialism is the part of delivery that doesn't show up on the slide deck — the room dynamics, the moments a participant goes silent, the credibility a senior person earns or spends in the first three minutes. Calm, dry-humoured, hard to ruffle. Cohorts trust him quickly and then keep trusting him.
Thirty-eight years in the air — seven flying rotary, thirty-one with the airlines — twenty-two of them in the trainer's seat. Peter has watched the same handful of human-factor patterns play out across cockpits, command structures, and crew rooms; that's what convinced him the patterns travel. The equipment changes; the people don't. He joined Ad Astra to take what aviation learned the hard way out into industries that haven't had to. A true believer in the power of Human Factors to change how organisations work, he treats the method as something to be carried — into insurance, shipping, classrooms, dressing rooms — wherever it would do good.
The most dangerous thing a leadership team can do is prefer a clean narrative to an uncomfortable truth. We build the habits that surface the truth, and the leadership that can hear it.
Posters don't prevent errors. Trained reflexes do. Our work leaves participants with working skill, tested under realistic load.
They are not opposites. They are the two supports a learning culture stands on. Remove either one and it collapses.
Every operation is a human operation first. Technology, process and structure sit on top of that foundation, not the other way around.
No BDRs, no qualifying funnels. Our discovery calls are taken by the senior practitioners who lead engagements. Thirty minutes, candid, useful.