Randall Greene, who steered Safe Flight Instrument Corp. for nearly two decades and was a past chairman of the Corporate Angel Network (CAN), died Wednesday after a prolonged battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Greene took over the company his father and inventor Leonard Greene founded in 1946 in 2001 as president and CEO and expanded its mission of safety innovation surrounding flight performance systems, becoming a leading supplier of instrumentation and safety systems for general and business aviation, commercial, and military fixed-wing and rotorcraft.
That company has pioneered numerous safety enhancements involving AoA, stall warning, landing and approach indicators, automatic throttle systems, wind shear recovery guides, and safe takeoff rotation computation, among others.
A pilot who amassed 9,500 hours in 270 types, Randall Greene earned degrees from Boston University, General Theological Seminary, and Yale University. Born the year before Safe Flight was established, he began his aviation career as a charter and U.S. Forest Service pilot in Taos, New Mexico.
He later joined Bendix-General Aviation Avionics Division as a program manager and engineering test pilot and served as director of international government relations for AlliedSignal Aerospace, both businesses now part of Honeywell.
In 1988, he founded Commander Aircraft Company in Oklahoma City after acquiring the type certificates of the former Rockwell Commander single-engine 112/114 series of aircraft from Gulfstream Aerospace. By 1991 had led a successful public offering of the company and later served as president of flight test and marketing consulting company Aeronautical Systems Corporation in Boulder, Colorado, before joining Safe Flight.
Over the years, he had garnered 19 U.S. patents, won numerous awards for his safety innovation and charitable contributions, and became an associate fellow of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots and an FAA-designated test pilot for FAR Part 23, 25, 27, and 29 aircraft.
He was long affiliated with CAN, which arranges transportation aboard business jets for cancer patients to and from hospitals, serving as chairman and then chairman emeritus, and also is a former vice-chairman of the board of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum.
Greene handed over the role of president of Safe Flight to Matthew Greene in 2019, carrying on the family tradition, and earlier this year the company was sold to Loar Group.
