Pilot, underwriter, investigator, expert witness

Andries Marthinus (Andre) Roos works at the point where aviation safety science, insurance and the law meet. Over a career of approximately thirty years in aviation and more than fifteen years in insurance and financial services, he has assessed pilots, aircraft, operations and operating environments before an accident, investigated what went wrong after one, and explained the result to underwriters, reinsurers, claims committees and courts.

From the cockpit to the underwriting desk

Andre earned his private pilot licence in 1997 and has flown general aviation aircraft since. His early professional life was technical and entrepreneurial: a National Diploma in Electrical Engineering, a Diploma in Business Management from the UNISA School of Business Leadership, and a decade building and selling electronics and manufacturing businesses in South Africa and Mozambique, including a government-mandated feasibility project for a low-cost airline.

In 2010 he joined South Africa’s largest life insurer as an adviser specialising in life, disability and income-protection cover for pilots and aircrew, later leading one of its franchise practices with a team of twenty. The work exposed a structural gap in the market: aviation risk was being priced on exposure proxies rather than on the factors that actually drive accidents. From August 2018 he has been contracted to the same insurer as its Aviation Risk Specialist, formulating the company’s aviation underwriting philosophy, guidelines and requirements, aligning them with reinsurance treaties, and investigating aviation-related claims in the office and in the field.

Cranfield and the evidence base

To put the underwriting method on a scientific footing, Andre completed the MSc in Safety and Accident Investigation (Air Transport) at Cranfield University between 2019 and 2021. His thesis, A Comparative Analysis of General Aviation Crash Data of the United Kingdom and South Africa, examined 983 official field-investigation reports and combined the statistical findings with a pilot survey and structured interviews with pilots, instructors, engineers and students. It identified correlations between pilot age, total and recent flying experience, licence type, phase of flight and injury severity, and found that South African general aviation experienced significantly more powerplant-related occurrences than the United Kingdom. Several of those findings now sit at the centre of his underwriting and risk-assessment work.

Advanced aviation risk assessment models

Andre’s assessment method rests on the dynamic interaction between risks rather than on any single measure. The premise is simple but demanding: no single factor explains aviation risk, and the hazard lies in how the risks combine. An experienced pilot in a familiar aircraft can still be exposed by an unfamiliar operation in a hostile environment; a modest aircraft flown conservatively in benign conditions may present very little risk. The models began as a structured underwriting discipline and has evolved into software-supported risk intelligence that incorporates flight data monitoring.

SkyGuard

Andre is the founder and chief executive of SkyGuard, an aviation insurance and risk-intelligence venture conceived during his Cranfield studies and developed over the following years. SkyGuard brings aircraft hull and liability underwriting together with aircrew life and loss-of-licence cover, and applies flight data monitoring and analytics to assess risk dynamically rather than once a year at renewal. The underlying philosophy is that insurance should anticipate risk and help operators correct it, not merely absorb the loss after the event. Details of SkyGuard’s products, licensing and reinsurance arrangements are published by SkyGuard itself.

Investigation, expert evidence and writing

Andre’s accident-investigation training combines Cranfield’s field methodology with his own claims-investigation experience. He has reviewed official accident reports, reconstructed sequences of events from documentary and physical evidence, and applied human-factors analysis to pilot decision-making. He has provided independent expert reports in High Court proceedings in South Africa concerning aviation-related insurance disputes, pilot medical certification standards and the duties of insurance intermediaries, and he is available to attorneys, advocates, insurers and operators for pre-litigation consultation and expert evidence.

He writes a regular column for World Airnews on human factors in aviation emergencies, including the fight, flight or freeze response, the “impossible turn” after engine failure on take-off, wrong-engine shutdown, rejected take-offs and spatial disorientation. He has been interviewed on the limits of data-driven safety and speaks to industry audiences on aviation risk, underwriting and the use of operational data.

His first book, The Death of the Salesman and the Rise of the Trusted Financial Advisor (AuthorHouse, 2018), grew out of his years advising pilots and aircrew. Its argument, that trust and candid professional judgement matter more than any sales technique, is the same principle that runs through his underwriting and expert work.

Professional standing

Andre holds the Cranfield MSc, an NQF Level 5 qualification in financial planning, the South African regulatory examinations for representatives and key individuals (RE5 and RE1), and FSCA key-individual status within that insurer’s licence. He is a member of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators and is associated with the professional loss-adjusting community in South Africa. He is a director of Aviation Risk Management Services (Pty) Ltd, through which independent risk and investigation work is conducted.

He lives in Somerset West in the Western Cape, flies an Alpi Pioneer 300, and remains, by his own description, a pilot first: the practical experience of flying continues to inform how he reads a logbook, a flight-data trace or an accident report.