Chris Weir

Chris is a Principal Consultant at Whitetree, specialising in reliability and maintainability engineering. He brings over 30 years of experience in the UK defence sector and holds credentials including CRE, CRL, CMM, and CMRP. His work blends deep technical expertise with real-world, through-life experience across the design, development, and sustainment of military systems.

He began his career as an electronics technician apprentice in a munitions depot with the UK Ministry of Defence. Over two decades, he progressed into senior through-life support and engineering roles as well as completing a Postgraduate Diploma in Supportability Engineering at the University of Portsmouth. Since then, Chris has held key reliability positions with BAE Systems, Thales UK, and Boeing Defence UK, supporting major defence programmes through modelling and analysis, strategy definition, and targeted improvements to reliability engineering and maintenance support practices.

Whitetree Group

Whitetree Group is a UK‑based consultancy specialising in transforming complex engineering, logistical, and support challenges into sustainable, high‑performing outcomes. With a strong heritage in defence and government, Whitetree delivers integrated services across management consulting, decision support, training solutions, system architecture, and support engineering. In its Support Engineering practice, Whitetree provides end‑to‑end capability for Availability, Reliability & Maintainability (AR&M), product‑support strategies, lifecycle cost modelling, obsolescence management, and bespoke support solution design — enabling clients to optimise platform availability, reduce sustainment risk and deliver through‑life value.

Learn more at Whitetree.co.uk

Beyond the Numbers: Human Reliability in Practice

Chris is the author of the article series Beyond the Numbers: Human Reliability in Practice.

Chris is expanding his focus into Human Factors and Human Reliability Analysis. In his article series Beyond the Numbers: Human Reliability in Practice, he shares what he’s learning along the way, from practical techniques to real-world examples, showing how human-centred thinking can be woven into traditional reliability engineering tools and processes.