As an Insurance Advisor at Hotaling Insurance Services, Robert Bernard applies an aerospace engineer’s discipline to risk management. He advises aircraft owners, corporate flight departments, privately held business owners, and real estate developers and construction firms across three specialty practice areas. Rather than leading with a product, Robert starts with structure — risk mitigation, tax-advantaged income, liquidity, and asset protection — then examines every area of exposure and educates clients on the most cost-effective way to manage it. In aviation, that means auditing hull valuations, liability limits, Part 91 and Part 135 exposures, and pilot loss-of-license coverage. For business owners, it means executive benefit plans, key person coverage, buy-sell funding, and continuity and succession planning. For developers and general contractors, he reads the contract before he prices the coverage.
Robert has worked at McDonnell Douglas and Cessna Aircraft Company — environments where precision and failure prevention were nonnegotiable. He has also been a serial entrepreneur and real estate investor for more than 20 years. That combination shapes how he practices today. He understands aircraft the way owners and operators do, he understands contractual risk transfer and captive analysis the way developers do, and he approaches every client’s program the way an engineer approaches a system: each piece has to strengthen the whole. He works alongside clients’ attorneys, CPAs, and lenders to make sure it does.
Outside the office, Robert is a student pilot training to fly gliders, with plans to earn his single-engine land private pilot license within the next six months.
Aircraft owners often assume a premium follows the airplane. In practice it tracks pilot hours and how the aircraft is actually flown, and hull values can drift for years while the premium stays put. Robert audits those details, educates clients on what he finds, and does not manage money: he engineers structure.
Ready to have your risk program engineered instead of quoted? Contact Robert Bernard at Hotaling Insurance Services to schedule a coverage audit.
