The company president, Alan Schier, founded the company in 1990 and has grown TPG into what it is today.  In addition to being a very successful businessman, he is an exceptional engineer with expertise that extends across a diverse array of disciplines.

Alan's natural predisposition toward technical endeavors led him first to start an automotive repair business. He then went on to recieve a Bachelor's and Master's of Science in Engineering from Stanford University in 1986, complete with academic accolades including the F.E. Terman Engineering Award, Rotary Foundation Scholarship, election to the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society and election to the Phi Beta Kappa liberal arts honor society. His career before the pilot group also yielded honors including the Finnigan Corporation Award for Engineering Excellence, several NASA Tech Brief Awards, and Published articles in the area of spacecraft control.

Since founding The Pilot Group, he has achieved many significant accomplishments in the course of meeting needs of his clients. These include:

• Design of the world's largest digital servo control system used for the two hydraulic snakes in the movie "Anaconda", each having 120 coupled degrees of freedom.
• Optomechanical design of some of the world's largest spectrograph optics for the Keck telescope.
• Design and fabrication of the highest performance gas pressure control system in regular industrial use, accurate to 0.1 psi over a 1000psi range with a resolution better than 0.02 psi.
• Design and fabrication of the world's fastest research telescope mount, used in the RAPTOR and ROTSE programs.

Mr. Schier speaks fluent German, some French, sang Bass in an award-winning acapella group, and can, in theory, play the piano.