Deputy Director Aviation
Surbana Jurong Private Limited

Michael has spent 26 years of his career in aviation, and he has completed many projects in the field of air traffic management, airport operations, safety, aviation environment, aviation economics and information management. Over the years, he managed to grow from a technical job position into a supervising role as an international project manager with technical content, who knows how to deal with problems, interface with team members of different cultural backgrounds and achieve satisfying results. In addition, he has had the opportunity to work for different aviation organisations, allowing him to see the different perspectives of various aviation subjects and better understand the playing field in the aviation industry. His work experience at the Netherlands Ministry of Transport also allowed him to be involved in many regulatory subjects, such as safety, aviation economics, innovation, and sustainability. As aviation consulting lead, he managed the client accounts for EUROCONTROL, EU, Dubai, and Singapore. He set up a consultancy firm in Singapore in 2015 and when it reached profitability after 3 years, he decided to move on and take more responsibilities in expanding the aviation business at Surbana Jurong.

For several years now, Michael works under the Changi East Development Programme in several Changi Terminal 5 design projects in the role of aerodrome specialist. In those projects the focus was aerodrome operations and safety risk assessments in the design, followed by construction methodology and logistics. When T5 was paused, he worked on an MRT tunnel construction project at Changi Airport and Paya Lebar Airbase funded by Land Transport Authority (LTA) among other projects.

In addition, up to 2018 he was a certified external IATA instructor on courses in the Air Navigation Services and Civil Aviation domains. Then since 2018, he has been an adjunct lecturer teaching the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) course Airport Systems Planning & Design at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD).