Meet the Owner –
Lt Col (Ret) Emile Sendral

Top Gun!  My parents let me watch it in 1986, when I was 6 years old and I immediately knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life!  The realism of the films flight sequences, the flight suits, the callsigns, the portrayed camaraderie, every detail convinced myself and thousands of others from an entire generation that a pilots life was the way to go.

I commissioned in the United States Air Force the day I graduated college, and it was off to flight school.  For 22 years I had the privilege of flying around the world with the most capable men and women our nation has to offer.  I’ve been fortunate to continue my aviation career with one of the finest airline operations in the world, Delta Air Lines, most recently flying the Airbus 330 internationally.  But flying internationally lends itself to a lot of downtime so I began to look for new, additional opportunities.  

In early 2025, my family and I met a production location scout and some television producers and soon thereafter filmed a commercial in our house.  Spending the day with the producers and production crew sprouted the idea for GDE Aviation Advisors.  The production crew that I watched that day seemed to operate the same way all of my aircrews did, mission focused, attention to detail, prepared, seamless coordination, flexible, adaptable etc. It closely resembled the most rewarding and satisfying job of my Air Force career.

That job was a Presidential Advance Agent, where I spent 10 years planning and executing Air Force One movements worldwide.  Scouting an airfield as small as Fayetteville NC or Topeka KS or as large as JFK or Schiphol in Amsterdam were all the same.  You start from nothing, research and plan, build a team, build relationships, work hard and in a week or two execute.  There was nothing more rewarding than seeing all of your hard work pay off with a flawless arrival of the leader of the free world, oftentimes broadcast to millions around the world. 

“GDE” stands for “Good Deal Emile,” a name I was commonly referred to over my career, a callsign if you will, because my timing seemed to always work out just right and I would find myself on all of the “good deal” trips.  My experience planning Presidential movements, conducting combat missions in diverse environments, and navigating the complexities of military and commercial aviation regulations gives me the unique ability to ensure productions achieve both technical accuracy and cinematic impact while working with productions constraints.  Watching the production crew in action reminded me so much of the best parts of my military career and created a desire to want to lend my military and commercial aviation expertise to the film and television production industry.  It led me to wonder….could this be my next “Good Deal?”