Experience
How our engagements work.
The five patterns below are representative of the engagements we deliver, drawn from the kinds of work our practitioners have led inside major carriers. They show how we would scope, approach and conclude each type of review — client-specific case studies are shared in confidence during scoping, never published. If a pattern resembles your situation, that is the point.
Engagement patterns
Five representative engagements
Filter by discipline, or read straight through — each card links to the full case below.
Internal audit effectiveness review
Audit function assessed against aviation risk coverage, skills, analytics use and audit-committee reporting.
Audit-universe redesign
Group audit universe rebuilt around commercial, operational and technology risk — replacing a finance-weighted legacy plan.
Workload & organisation assessment
Audit team structure, skills mix and workload tested against the plan the committee had approved.
Revenue-management controls review
Pricing overrides, waivers, refunds and distribution incentives tested end to end across channels and stations.
Warranty & guarantee recovery review
OEM, engine and component warranty entitlements reviewed against actual claims raised, tracked and settled.
Engagement pattern 01
Airline internal audit effectiveness review
Executive challenge
The audit committee had approved plans and received reports for years, but could not answer a simple question: is this function covering the risks that could actually hurt the airline? Audit effort sat heavily in finance and compliance while commercial, operational and technology exposure went largely untested. Reports arrived long after fieldwork, and the committee had begun to treat them as history rather than intelligence.
Scope
- Full audit function: charter, plan, methodology, staffing and reporting
- Three completed plan cycles of audit files and committee papers
- Interviews across the executive, committee members and audit staff
- Analytics maturity and use of data in planning and fieldwork
- All group entities within the audit charter
RaKi approach
- Assessed the function against professional standards and aviation peer practice, dimension by dimension.
- Mapped three years of audit effort against a reconstructed view of the airline's actual risk profile.
- Reviewed a sample of audit files and reports for evidence quality, root-cause depth and decision-usefulness.
- Ran working sessions with the CAE and committee chair to test findings before drafting.
- Produced a prioritised uplift roadmap with owners and sequencing, not a scorecard alone.
Findings — by category
- Coverage concentrated in finance while higher-exposure commercial and operational areas went untested
- Reporting cycle long enough that findings had lost relevance by committee date
- Limited use of analytics; conclusions rested on small samples
- Skills profile misaligned with the risk profile the plan needed to address
Outcomes
- Risk coverage improved — plan rebalanced toward the airline's actual exposure
- Reporting cycle reduced — findings reached the committee while still actionable
- Management visibility strengthened through interim reporting protocols
- Skills and sourcing plan agreed to close specialist gaps
Related capabilities
Facing something similar?
A confidential conversation with a senior practitioner — no obligation.
Discuss a similar situationEngagement pattern 02
Audit-universe redesign for an airline group
Executive challenge
The group's audit universe had been inherited, extended and never rebuilt. It reflected the organisation chart of a decade earlier: strong on ledgers and entities, silent on revenue management, distribution, technology and the subsidiaries that had since grown material. The committee suspected — correctly — that the plan's coverage percentages measured coverage of the wrong universe.
Scope
- Existing audit universe, risk register and three annual plans
- All group entities: mainline, subsidiaries and joint operations
- Interviews with entity leadership, risk owners and the audit team
- Assurance activity across all three lines, mapped for overlap and gaps
RaKi approach
- Built a bottom-up view of how the group actually earns, spends and depends on systems and third parties.
- Constructed an aviation-native universe spanning commercial, operational, technical, technology and corporate domains.
- Mapped every auditable entity to a risk owner and to existing assurance activity across the three lines.
- Scored and tiered the universe with the executive in facilitated sessions, so ownership was agreed, not assigned.
- Derived a multi-year plan from the universe, with clear rationale for what would not be audited and why.
Findings — by category
- Material revenue and technology domains absent from the legacy universe entirely
- Duplicate assurance in low-risk areas while single points of failure went unexamined
- Subsidiary risk treated at group level despite entity-specific exposure
- No documented rationale connecting the plan to the risk profile
Outcomes
- Risk coverage aligned to the real risk universe, with tiering the committee approved
- Control ownership improved — every auditable entity mapped to a named owner
- Assurance overlap removed and redirected to untested exposure
- Board reporting strengthened with a coverage view the committee can interrogate
Related capabilities
Facing something similar?
A confidential conversation with a senior practitioner — no obligation.
Discuss a similar situationEngagement pattern 03
Internal audit workload and organisation assessment
Executive challenge
The airline had grown; the audit function had not. Plans were approved each year and quietly missed each year, with deferrals explained engagement by engagement. Leadership could not tell whether the problem was headcount, skills mix, methodology drag or a plan that was simply undeliverable — and each explanation implied a different, expensive fix.
Scope
- Team structure, grades, skills and certifications against the approved plan
- Two full plan cycles of time records, deferrals and carry-overs
- Methodology and toolset — where audit hours were actually consumed
- Interviews with the CAE, audit staff and key stakeholders
RaKi approach
- Reconstructed where audit hours had genuinely gone across two plan cycles, engagement by engagement.
- Modelled the workload the approved plan actually implies, including travel, reporting and follow-up effort.
- Compared structure and skills against functions serving airlines of comparable scale and complexity.
- Tested three organisation options — restructure, co-source, hybrid — against cost and coverage.
- Agreed a target structure and transition sequence with the CAE and executive sponsor.
Findings — by category
- Approved plan materially exceeded deliverable capacity under any realistic assumption
- Senior time absorbed by administration and re-drafting rather than fieldwork direction
- Specialist gaps in commercial and technology audit driving repeated deferrals of exactly those reviews
- Role boundaries unclear between audit levels, causing duplicated review layers
Outcomes
- Roles clarified — a structure with defined accountability at every level
- Plan made deliverable — scope, capacity and sourcing brought into balance
- Recommendation ageing reduced through a follow-up workload that was finally resourced
- Co-sourcing targeted at specialist gaps rather than general capacity
Related capabilities
Facing something similar?
A confidential conversation with a senior practitioner — no obligation.
Discuss a similar situationEngagement pattern 04
Commercial and revenue-management controls review
Executive challenge
Revenue performance was tracking plan, yet the CFO kept encountering individually plausible exceptions: a waived penalty here, an overridden fare there, an incentive settled generously. No single item warranted escalation. The question leadership could not answer was whether these were noise — or a pattern with a material aggregate cost and, in places, indicators worth investigating.
Scope
- Pricing and revenue-management override activity across the network
- Refund, waiver and goodwill transactions across stations and channels
- Agency incentive and commission settlements against contract terms
- Delegated-authority limits as configured in systems versus as approved
- Full transaction populations for the review period — not samples
RaKi approach
- Extracted full transaction populations and profiled every override, waiver and refund by approver, station and channel.
- Tested system-configured authority limits against the delegation the board had actually approved.
- Recomputed incentive and commission settlements from contract terms and compared with amounts paid.
- Isolated exception clusters and reviewed them with commercial leadership before characterising any as fraud indicators.
- Designed override governance, monitoring rules and recovery workstreams with named owners.
Findings — by category
- Waiver and refund exceptions individually within authority but systematic in aggregate
- System authority limits wider than the approved delegation in several channels
- Incentive settlements diverging from contract terms in the payee's favour
- Concentration patterns at specific stations warranting further investigation
Outcomes
- Recoverable value identified and a recovery pipeline established with owners
- Override governance rebuilt — limits, logging and periodic review
- Continuous monitoring rules deployed over refund and waiver flows
- Management visibility strengthened with a standing commercial-controls report
Related capabilities
Facing something similar?
A confidential conversation with a senior practitioner — no obligation.
Discuss a similar situationEngagement pattern 05
Warranty and guarantee recovery review
Executive challenge
The purchase agreements were negotiated hard; the entitlements they secured were then administered softly. Between the carrier's engineering organisation and its MRO provider, no single owner tracked warranty and guarantee claims from removal event to settled credit. Leadership suspected that entitlements were expiring unclaimed — and had no register capable of confirming or refuting it.
Scope
- OEM airframe, engine and component warranty and guarantee agreements
- Removal, repair and claim records across carrier and MRO systems
- Claim lifecycle: identification, submission, follow-up and credit settlement
- Interfaces and responsibility split between carrier engineering and the MRO
RaKi approach
- Built a consolidated entitlement map from the agreements — what could be claimed, on what conditions, until when.
- Matched removal and repair events against claims actually raised, and claims raised against credits actually received.
- Traced dropped claims to the process step and organisation where they stalled.
- Prioritised the recoverable backlog by value and remaining eligibility window.
- Designed a single claims process across carrier and MRO, with one accountable owner and standing reporting.
Findings — by category
- Claimable events never raised as claims because entitlement awareness sat only in contracts, not systems
- Raised claims lost between carrier and MRO handoffs with no follow-up owner
- Settled credits not reconciled back to the originating claim
- Entitlement windows expiring on a predictable schedule with no expiry monitoring
Outcomes
- Recoverable value identified within still-open eligibility windows
- Claims process rebuilt end to end with a single accountable owner
- Entitlement register established with expiry alerts by fleet and supplier
- Management visibility strengthened through standing recovery reporting
Related capabilities
Facing something similar?
A confidential conversation with a senior practitioner — no obligation.
Discuss a similar situationStart a conversation
If one of these cases reads like your situation, the next step is a conversation — not a proposal.
Describe the situation in as much or as little detail as confidentiality allows. A senior practitioner will tell you honestly whether, and how, we would approach it.
Request a confidential 45-minute diagnostic