Walking through the entrance gate to Thorpe Park on a sunny day in May, I’m met with the distant mechanical rumblings of the theme park rides being put through their paces before the first of the day’s revellers arrive. Rather than join them for a stint on the rollercoasters, I’m off to meet Dawn Elson, who has been appointed to the brand-new role of group head of engineering at Merlin Entertainments. The rapidly expanding company, perhaps best known for operating UK sites including Thorpe Park and Alton Towers, now runs a staggering 110 attractions in 23 countries.
Elson has moved into the role from an illustrious career based in the aerospace industry, having spent 23 years moving up to senior engineering positions in the Royal Air Force, before moving on to become head of engineering at Gatwick.
Elson says she always felt a career in engineering was a possibility thanks to her father’s work as an HGV fitter. However, it wasn’t until she visited a careers fair that she decided it was the route for her.
“At the fair there was an army woman dressed up in her combat uniform standing next to a helicopter display stand. I asked her what she did and she told me she was an engineer in the army. I asked her if she fixed helicopters and she replied, ‘Oh no. I don’t! I’m in the helicopter and I tell the guys what to do.’ I thought, that’s the job for me.”
Elson went on to apply for an RAF sponsorship while at university in return for signing a permanent commission of 21 years. “It was a very competitive process to go through, to be selected as one of the few that receive a Cadetship, as it was called back then.” Elson laughs as she recalls the cavalier attitude with which she entered into the commission. “I actually signed away 21 years of my life at the age of 17.”
After completing her mechanical engineering degree, Elson began her first RAF job as junior engineering officer on Hercules aircraft. At the age of just 21 she was made responsible for a team of 50 technicians and 30 Hercules planes that were deployed around the world.
Elson next moved to RAF St Athan in Wales to run the deep-strip maintenance bay for the RB199 and Adour engines used in Tornado aircraft and the now decommissioned Jaguar fleet. She later focused on air transport and refuelling fleets and was the senior engineer on the TriStar aircraft 216 squadron at Brize Norton.
Happy memories
However, Elson says the pinnacle of her career was her role as officer commanding
engineering and logistics at RAF Waddington. “I had five fleets of spy planes around the world and if there’s a highlight in my career at the RAF, that’s absolutely it. It was an amazing time – and to have a team of nearly 1,000 technicians deployed all around the world was truly phenomenal.”
This role also gave Elson her first taste of a more hands-off ‘matrix management’ approach where she had to influence and run the processes, standards and practices for all of the engineers indirectly through the officer commanding the various squadrons.
“You need to be able to influence from a position of credibility, so that people trust you and think it’s a good idea to carry out what you’ve suggested,” she explains. “You have to be compelling, you also have to be persuasive and you have to know exactly what you’re talking about.”
This is something Elson made sure of, undertaking three degrees and more than 30 aircraft training courses during her time in the RAF. Her initial degree was in mechanical engineering, and she later undertook an RAF-sponsored executive MBA and a masters degree in defence studies at the RAF staff college where the top 10% of senior-grade officers spend a year learning about military planning and global and current affairs.
Life-long learning
Elson says: “Life-long learning is very important. Interestingly, the majority of courses I’ve chosen to do are mostly about management. You need to know the fundamentals of engineering, and the equipment your guys are working on, but the basics of engineering are absolutely that, the basics. They don’t change. Whereas management styles and techniques and thoughts and processes move on all the time. I think to stay relevant you need to be up-to-date with that and keep the way you think and approach a business problem fresh.”
While the RAF provided invaluable teaching and management lessons, Elson admits that it wasn’t always the easiest of environments to work in as a female engineer. “When I started out as an engineer there was approximately 7% of females within the RAF and engineering. Move on 25 years, and we’re at 9%. That’s shocking! I honestly believed that during that time we would be at 30% or maybe even 50%, as girls are very scientifically gifted and have very logical brains and it’s just absolutely wasted. There are tonnes of girls that could have made amazing engineers and amazing managers, and were just never shown that opportunity.”
Elson does her part to try and redress this imbalance, speaking at schools and colleges to spread the message that all young people, regardless of gender, can have rewarding and varied careers in engineering.
“A few years ago I spoke at the Association of Colleges annual conference up in Birmingham to tell head teachers we need to be getting the kids early and explain the differences in engineering,” she says. “Our careers advice just isn’t good enough or early enough to explain it.”
While Elson has experienced some sexist environments in the RAF, doing so has positively informed the rest of her career.
“It taught me an awful lot,” she says. “All the management training really shapes you into a good version of yourself. It brought out the best in me, and when I went to Gatwick it enabled me to think about the way we would have approached these things in the military, and then put a business spin on it.”
Elson moved to the role of senior manager of engineering services at Gatwick in 2012. The transition from the military to the commercial world was a steep learning curve, but with the absence of the bureaucratic ‘checks and balances’ of the air force she was finally able to apply all the additional skills she’d learnt in her management MBA.
The greater freedom and responsibility at Gatwick also began to help Elson get over the ‘imposter syndrome’ that she says has plagued her throughout her career. “I think females especially experience this in a technical, male-dominated environment. I’m always worried that someone is going to question me and if I don’t know the answer they’ll say why on earth did you give her that job? So I work hard and do an awful lot of background reading and analysis, trying different solutions, reworking processes theoretically to see if they’ll work.”
However, Elson’s achievements attest to the fact that she’s no imposter. During her time at Gatwick she led a huge change programme to make the engineering team more cost-efficient under the threat of the whole of the engineering function being outsourced. “I arranged an in-house competition challenging every single member of the engineering team to find a way to save money. One technician suggested replacing aerosol cans to clean out the lenses on the X-ray scanners, which cost £10,000 a year, with personal compressor units – which cost £200. With every technician having ideas like this, we cut the costs, while exceeding the output and retaining all our in-house technicians.”
As a testament to her work, Elson won the First Women Award in 2013. Characteristically modest, she says: “I was absolutely thrilled – as I thought I was just somebody else doing my job.”
Undoubtedly, the business savvy she demonstrated at Gatwick prompted Merlin Entertainments to headhunt Elson for the brand new role of group head of engineering. Previously, the various attractions dotted around in the UK, Europe, US, Asia and Australia have operated independently, being managed by individual engineering site managers. Elson sits above them, making decisions for more than 100 theme parks and attractions.
“This is the first time we’ve taken the group-wide view, which was one of the key attractions for me,” she says. “It’s huge, it’s global, how exciting is that? It’s a fantastic business, it’s about giving people a great time, but it’s also a blank sheet of paper as far as this role is concerned.”
Future challenges
Ultimately the job is about optimisation, with Elson looking at the individual sites, finding out what each one does best and replicating those lessons elsewhere, while getting rid of the parts that are ‘just okay’.
One of the biggest challenges will be how to apply best practice across such a diverse set of attractions. “We’ve resort theme parks like Thorpe Park, the London, Dubai and Orlando Eyes; the Madame Tussauds groups and the Sealife aquariums – they’re all very different, and with that there are different technical challenges.”
Elson explains it will be a case of finding out what systems and processes work well for the various offerings, whether that’s rollercoasters or aquarium tanks, and achieving 100% reliability and performance.
Cost efficiency is a focus, but Elson says it won’t be about spending less. “If we have the same rollercoaster in different locations, why wouldn’t we think about buying spares for all of them and then doing consignment stock out to them?” she says.
Safety is also a key issue. Last year, the Alton Towers ride Smiler crashed, leaving four people seriously injured. This is something Elson is determined won’t happen again. “For me, it’s about robust systems and procedures. Nobody wants to come to work and make a mistake. In any industry there’s always that human-machine interface, and I think what you have to have is a way to take the human out of the system. So, even if someone makes a bad decision, then the system or the machine or the procedure stops them from having a catastrophic impact.”
Elson aims for Merlin Entertainments to be the world’s best entertainment group and is beginning to set out a realistic road map to get optimisation in place. “The fundamental baseline is there, and it’s good. So once I’ve understood where the tiny opportunities might be, it will be a bit like fine-tuning your engine. Simply tweak the fuel-to-air ratio a little bit and you can get another 10 miles per gallon out of it.”