About

Ash Skett, Director

I have spent over a decade at sea, and the last eight years of it around uncrewed and remotely operated vessels: 12 m and 18 m uncrewed surface vessels, offshore and close inshore, operated from remote operations centres rather than from a bridge. The sailing came first, and it is where the instinct for what the sea will do to a plan comes from.

I was a founding team member at SEA-KIT International in 2018 and left in 2025 as its Operations Director. In between I built the operating side of the business rather than one slice of it, and that is the experience UMC sells.

I started UMC because the same gap keeps appearing. Teams build a capable vessel and then discover that operating it for real is a different discipline, with its own paperwork, its own failure modes and its own approvers. I am not an autonomy researcher and I do not sell software. I am the person who has stood in the control centre at three in the morning deciding whether to continue, hold or recover, and written down how that decision gets made.

SEA-KIT International, 2018 to 2025

Founding team, then Operations Director

I joined as one of the original operators and helped shape the business itself: the way the vessels were actually going to be run, the early customer conversations, and the operational input into first-generation platform development. I finished on the leadership team as Operations Director, responsible for the people, procedures, facilities, assurance and stakeholder relationships that operations depend on.

Two things from that period matter most to a client.

I built the company's testing and commissioning process from scratch. There was no template. Leading commissioning was one of my roles, and what came out of it was a structured route by which a new system could be tested, proven, accepted and handed into service - repeatably, not once.

And I helped create the operations team. The people, the competence framework, the training, the shift structure and the operating culture around genuinely novel technology. It is the same problem most of my clients now have.

From December 2024 I also managed the Plymouth test site.

The missions

I was operational lead on award-winning uncrewed missions.

A long-range Atlantic project, which is the endurance proof: these vessels can stay out, keep working and keep being controlled. The 2019 North Sea crossing before it.

And in 2022, the Tonga campaign - seabed mapping and volcano survey - run from a control room in the United Kingdom, roughly 16,000 km from the vessel. If you want to know whether long-range remote operation works in practice, rather than in a brochure, that is the answer.

The rest of the operating side

• Writing and revising the operational procedures and risk mitigation strategies.
• Standing up and running multiple remote operations centres, with the watch routines, role structure, escalation and continuity plans that go with them.
• Leading FMEA workshops on multiple platforms, including two first-in-class designs.
• Planning and running trials and commissioning campaigns, from factory testing through harbour and site acceptance.
• Designing and delivering operator training and competency development, across internal teams and clients.
• Mobilising shore bases and getting vessels safely in and out of the water.
• Preparing the case that puts an uncrewed vessel in front of a flag administration, a class surveyor, a harbour authority or a client, then sitting in the room while it is questioned.

I have also worked with the MCA during the development of regulatory material for uncrewed vessels and operator competency, which is a useful thing to have done when you are on the other side of the table trying to get a vessel approved.

What that leaves me able to do

• Operational readiness assessed against what actually happens at sea, not against a document template.
• Remote operations centres designed as an operating model, from capability tier through watchkeeping to continuity.
• Commissioning and trials built as a repeatable process rather than a one-off campaign, because I have built one from a blank sheet.
• Regulatory and certification work with flag administrations and classification societies, including trial exemptions and operational limitations.
• Competence frameworks and training that stand up when a client or an insurer asks how you know.
• Continuous operations modelled properly. I have worked through what running three 17 m remotely operated vessels around the clock actually takes: hierarchy, headcount, shift patterns, remote-master ratios, competence, fatigue and cost.
• European deployment for operators bringing a vessel in from outside the region.
• The operational answers in a room full of investors, primes or customers, which is often what decides whether they believe the rest of it.

The material this work is framed against

Publicly available frameworks used routinely in this work include the MCA Workboat Code, the MUKRWG Code of Practice for uncrewed vessels, IMO MSC.1/Circ.1604 on MASS trials, and IMCA guidance. Where a programme sits outside UK waters, the equivalent national route is mapped as part of the job.

How I work

Directly, and in writing. Scope and price agreed before work starts. Findings given straight, including the ones you would rather not hear, because a review that tells you everything is fine is worth nothing.

Current client names are kept private unless a client asks otherwise, so you will not find logos on this site.