From humble beginnings

PS Engineering marks 40 years

January 1, 2025 By Julie Summers Walker

Mark Scheuer was a young engineer working for Hewlett-Packard when he bought his first airplane in 1985, a Grumman AA-1.

Photography by Chris Rose.

“It was a flawless airplane, but it was really hard to speak to my wife, Joannie. Cockpit communications were very primitive. So, I thought, we need an intercom,” he says. “Back in 1984-85, if you watched pilots take off, nobody was ever wearing headsets. They were using the speaker, and I didn’t want Joannie yelling at me when we were flying. I looked at what was available, and nothing suited my needs. That’s where AeroCom came from.”

He launched his first product, a portable intercom, at aviation events like EAA AirVenture, driving the product, his wife, and a couple friends from across the country to demo it. “We took a completely different approach to a portable intercom; we gave it individually gated microphones. Pilots understood that the fewer mics that are open, the less noise you’re going to hear in the headset.”

He then launched other audio products as he continued to work for HP, working from his basement with Joannie helping answer phones and taking care of the finances. They’d been transferred with HP to Knoxville, Tennessee, and in 1994 he decided to leave HP and take his fledgling company, PS Engineering, full-time.

“It was hard because Hewlett-Packard was such a great place to work, but my wife was so encouraging,” he says. “I woke up one morning and said, ‘honey, I really want to take my company fulltime.’ And she was 100-percent behind me.”

It’s hard to encompass 40 years of engineering ingenuity into one short article, but PS Engineering’s innovations have revolutionized audio panels in aircraft. From the original AeroCom to the PMA 6000 to the 8000 to Bluetooth in the cockpit, PS Engineering’s products have kept pace with changing technology, often leading the evolution.

“We really pride ourselves on innovation, which has ultimately led to our growth,” Scheuer says. “We make many different kinds of audio controllers now. General aviation is still a good part of our business. In 2017 we got into the special mission marketplace with the Air Force. And I’ve been very fortunate to be able to bring in top-tier talent for electrical design.”

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