[ Jet engine revving up ]
[ Sonic boom ]
[ Music ]
>> From an early age, I found that I had a fair amount
of mechanical intellect just from playing
with Legos and K'Nex.
From the crazy designs that I used to come up with,
it was pretty obvious to me that I needed to go
into something with design.
[ Music ]
>> When I was a kid, I raised birds,
and I also liked everything mechanical.
I got a car from my grandpa, and I took it completely apart
and put it back together again.
Here's the HUD camera prototype.
I want to see if it fits.
That's way too big.
This is the HUD right there.
>> Yeah.
>> So, yeah, we don't have much room at all.
I've always liked mechanical things,
and I think engineering was just the perfect fit for me.
I think I was born to do this.
[ Music ]
>> I went to air shows when I was a kid where you could fly
in the plane for a penny a pound
so it was a pretty good deal when you're little.
And I think, at that point in time,
I always thought I'd be working on aircraft in the future.
Aero mechanical design group integrates hardware and systems
into typical military and commercial aircraft
to make them flight research vehicles.
>> A common task for the design group is creating
and designing a bracket or a fixtures
to hold a research instrument on one of our airplanes.
>> You might have a new probe that goes on an airplane
and they want to fly it on an F-15, we'll help build a probe
or tell them where they can put it
or tell them what their limits are and what we can do for them.
>> Generally, it'll be an instrument
that measures something in the air or some sort
of camera system, that kind of thing as far
as taking what somebody already did
and integrating it into the aircraft.
>> We are the middleman in coming up with the data
for research projects.
>> A lot of the design work that we do has to account
for the environment that airplanes operate in.
That might include climate, where it gets very cold
and very hot, and being able to function well in the air stream
if something is mounted on the outside of the airplane.
It also has to account for precipitation
and corrosive effects of the environment to make sure
that the air worthiness
of the part isn't compromised during its mission.
For example, if a sensor is being mounted to the skin
of a wing, we might have to design or change the shape
of the wing to allow for proper airflow around it during flight.
>> This is our Gulfstream aircraft.
And right now we're testing a morphing flap.
Basically, this flap flexes instead of actuates downwards.
My job in this project was to facilitate the installation
of the flap into the wing.
Some of those roles include creating drawings
for structural components that attach the two together
and providing up-to-date inspections,
verifying that the flap surfaces align well
with the predicted flap data.
Right now, I'm going to bring in the reference model
for the right wing that the scan will be compared to.
And you can see that we have a really good match.
Basically, the green shows
that the two surfaces are aligned very well.
The blue surface is showing that the surface is slightly below
where we predicted and red slightly above.
It's important for us to know
that the two surfaces are aligned well
because previous predictions were based off
of an idealized model.
The idealized model tells us that the plane is safe.
However, if we go back and we find
out that the actual airplane is not joining up well
with that idealized model, our predictions
for flight safety are no longer valid.
[ Airplane Sounds ] [ Music ]
[ Background conversation ]
>>If we can-- if we put the cone on and then just leave it.
Can we leave it for a while?
We'll come up with the design
and then we'll often times run it by the crew and decide
if it's okay with them as to where we put it
and how it's going to be mounted.
And then we'll have structures people look at it.
Knock, knock.
>> Yeah?
>> We'll take the preliminary drawings down to the shop,
either sheet-metal or the machine shop, and have them look
at it-- see how manufacturable it is.
Is there a lot of difference between manufacturability as far
as aluminum vs. stainless-?
>> Absolutely.
>> On these parts?
>> Oh, yeah.
>> Aluminum would give us a good trial maybe.
>> That's fine. We could always come back and make another one.
>> Right.
>> Are you redrawing this now, then?
Are you making some modifications?
>> I'm just making the fixes.
>> Okay.
>> All right.
>> And then when you do, bring it back over.
>> Yeah, I will.
>> So we can look it over again.
>> That sounds good.
>> Okay.
>> Thank you sir.
>> All righty.
>> All right.
This is the inside of that nose cone
that we're looking to put on.
We've gotten the nominal sizes of the equipment
from instrumentation and we put that on the pallet.
We only have so much real estate so we have to just make sure
that everything is adequately spaced, we know how big it is.
And we're just taking those components and doing a--
just making sure we have enough room for everything.
[ Airplane taking off ]
>> In SOFIA, we added all kinds of things to the aircraft inside
and outside, pretty extensive modifications on that aircraft.
We had to install large thermal insulation blankets
and foam insulation into the telescope cavity.
We added maintenance stairways and scaffolding
into the cavity, added all the racks.
[ Airplane landing ]
>> After the part has been installed
and it's been signed off, we may be called back to do revisions
if the project requirements change while the part is
being used.
For example, we found that the cameras on the back
of the aircraft were getting way too cold.
Because they were getting cold,
they were distorting the lens and, thus,
distorting the picture
that people were seeing in the control room.
I'll be taking a look at that and trying to find out a way
to prevent the cameras from getting too cold
so we don't have this problem in the future.
>> The HD camera goes to minus 22 degrees when we're at 40,000.
>> I think what's happening is you've got an aluminum body
which contracts a lot with cold.
>> Exactly. Yeah.
>> And it's just crushing the lands.
>> So it's not even the polycarbonate that's the problem,
It's the body.
>> If we take the case that you can--
you're talking about and we cut it in such a way
that we fit it into-- like take-out--
>> This RTV.
Make this hole a little bit bigger
and then glue the case to the panel, so that the camera's still not really touching the case...
>> That sounds good.
Okay. We'll do that.
>> I like designing because I get to try to be imaginative,
try to figure out things, develop my own ideas on how to do something.
It's interesting to me.
>> You never know what good idea is going to turn into something great.
>> One of the coolest things about my job is I get to work
on nearly all the airplanes at the center.
On one particular day, I might be working
on a remote control airplane, a glider, and a fighter aircraft.
On another, it might be a 747 or a small propellered airplane.
What keeps the job interesting is the great amount of variety
of design tasks that are always required.
We provide support in many engineering areas kind
of like handymen for the engineering world.
>> I think a lot of people think that engineering isn't creative as art or something,
but there's a lot of different things you can do with the facts you have.
And that's what I like about engineering. We're doing good science and we're trying to make the world a
better place.
To get paid to have fun to do things like that- to do good things and feel good about it-
I can't think of a better combination, really.