I was in London, between ship contracts, with about a month of vacation left before I had to go back to sea for another six months. I was applying for IT jobs and starting to worry that I wasn’t going to land anything in time.
Then I got a phone call.
“Is this Craig Corbin?”
Yes.
“Is this the Craig Corbin who used to work on airplanes, works on boats, and understands Inmarsat satellite communications?”
Yes, but I had no idea how he was connecting all of those pieces. In my mind, they had very little to do with each other. Airplanes and boats move at different speeds. I was an IT guy. I happened to do IT on boats. Where was the airplane angle coming from?
The recruiter explained. He had a job that had been open for about a year. It wasn’t published, he didn’t want people applying for it. He’d never thought they’d be able to fill it. Then he ran across my resume.
British Petroleum was trying to figure out how to make email work on their corporate fleet of Gulfstream jets. The CEO wanted to stay in contact with the company during international flights. They had Inmarsat satellite antennas on the aircraft. The question was whether anyone could make a reliable email system work over that connection.
The recruiter asked: “Do you know what any of that means?”
Absolutely. We did something similar on the ships.
On the boats, we’d built a mail process where you pull down the headers first, just the subject lines. You scan them, decide what matters, and only then download the full message body. We prioritized outbound traffic so small messages went first and large ones queued for later. On ships, that was a cost optimization. The recruiter told me this wasn’t about cost, “BP doesn’t have cost issues”,they just needed to know if it would work.
I told him: not only would it work, it does work. We’re already doing a version of it at sea.
A few days later, I was in BP’s London office meeting with a special R&D unit that had been toying with the idea for a couple of years. They liked what I had to say. They flew me business class to Chicago to meet the aircraft operations team. They liked what I had to say too.
I was engaged for approximately 6 months to get email working on the Gulfstreams.
Breaking it into small pieces
I know this sounds trivial today. We have Starlink. We have Wi-Fi on commercial flights. We have TVs on the back of every seat. But at the time, this was groundbreaking. It had never been done on corporate aircraft.
There was even a brief conversation about whether BP should develop a satellite solution they could resell. I’m not making that up, that’s how new the space was. I said no. The Inmarsat system was expensive but reliable. The antennas were already installed. Any aircraft modifications would require lengthy and expensive certification processes. We had what we needed. We just had to break the problem down into very small pieces so it would function over a very slow connection.
For 6 months, that’s what I did. Small pieces. Incremental gains. Header-first downloads. Message prioritization. Compression where it mattered. At the end of the engagement, BP had a functioning email solution on a fleet of Gulfstream jets using existing Inmarsat infrastructure.
Know your value
Here’s the part of the story I didn’t expect.
When the compensation conversation came up, the recruiter asked what I wanted to make per day. I threw out a number I was comfortable with.
He said: “I don’t like that number.”
I started thinking about how much lower I could go.
He said: “We need to triple that. We need to make sure BP believes you’re an expert in this field.”
We pitched a number more than 3 times what I’d originally asked for. BP accepted without hesitation. They got a working email solution. I got paid more as a contractor during that engagement than I make today.
The recruiter saw something I didn’t. He understood that the combination of skills on my resume, airplanes, ships, satellite communications, IT,wasn’t just unusual. It was the only resume that matched. And when you’re the only person who fits the job, you don’t price yourself like one of many. You price yourself like the one.
That’s a lesson I carry with me. Not the rate, the principle. Know what your combination of skills is worth. Because sometimes, the thing that makes your career path look scattered is the exact thing that makes you irreplaceable.