Cleared for Take Off

The last stop of a military or commercial aircraft built by the Boeing Co. is the Antelope Valley. In Palmdale or further north at Edwards Air Force base, these aircraft, some experimental in nature, get put through conditions they may never face again to ensure their safety and those on board. Overseeing the 650 employees of the test and evaluation center is John Stolting, who has been with Boeing for nearly 30 years having joined the company to work on the B-1B program. Putting an aircraft through its paces in extreme conditions can be exciting work, Stolting said. “You put these planes into conditions they are never intended to see in an operating environment,” he added. Stolting received his B.S. in aeronautics from San Jose State University and an MBA from the University of Phoenix. He serves on the board of the Antelope Valley College Foundation, which helps raise money for students to attend the school. Question: What is the role this facility plays in The Boeing Co.? Answer: We are all organized here under Boeing Test & Evaluation, or BT&E as we call it internally. Really what this is is coring up the testing and evaluation capabilities in the company into an organization so that it can support a multitude of programs. Right now we have 13, 14 different programs here across the Palmdale and Edwards (Air Force Base) facilities. That ranges from everything from a small, unmanned vehicle, the X-51A, the hypersonic engine demonstrator up to a 747-8, which is the largest commercial airplane they build. The one that is here is actually is the freighter, those are the first planes. The intercontinental version, the passenger version, just had its first flight here about a month ago. They will continue to do all the commercial certification testing for it. Title: Director of Flight Test Operations, Southwest Region Education: MBA from University of Phoenix, 2005; B.S. in Aeronautics from San Jose State University, 1983 Organizations: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and National Defense Industrial Association Personal: Married, with three daughters Q: You test both military and commercial aircraft here then? A: Our primary reason for being as it will is we are located with the Air Force Flight Test Center so for a lot of our programs the customer really drives where we do those tests. A lot of the military programs are based out of the Edwards area. We also use the facility here, at Air Force Plant 42, a production support facility; we have the 747-8 we’ve been testing out here for a year now. Q: What goes into the testing of an aircraft? A: The test evaluation phase is really checking the integrity and safety of the product before we deliver it to our customers. It is validating the design; it is going through and stressing the airplanes to their extreme limits to make sure that everything works under different failure modes. For example, this past Sunday we just did a maximum energy brake test out at Edwards. You have a 747 fully loaded as it would normally operate. We had the most worn brakes, the worst condition brakes you can fly with on the airplane. So you basically set it up very heavy with, in theory, the worst set of brakes you would normally operate to go barreling down the runway and then slam on the brakes and hope everything stops. Fortunately it did. It puts a lot of energy on the brakes and ultimately the brakes catch fire and the tires blow. We want to make sure the airplane can handle the extreme environments that they would ever see with passengers on them. Our most critical thing is to make sure the product is meeting all the stringent requirements for certification. Q: Are new requirements added for each new aircraft and then do you have to come up with new tests? A: There are new tests as there are new technologies that evolve. There is a standard set of stringent requirements from an FAA certification standpoint. On the military side we have a lot more extreme requirements. Those airplanes operate in a lot more different environments, in a warzone and those things so you have a lot more requirements with a military airplane than you do with a commercial variant. There are some changes. For the 787 which is an all composite airplane, there are some new things you do there for looking at how lightning tests perform because of the composite fuselage. It is also one of the first airplanes that is all electric; there are no bleed air systems on the airplane. That is another failure mode you are going to look at – how the airplanes will operate if different configurations of power go out. Q: What is your role in all this? A: I am the director of flight test operations, the southwest region in the BT&E organization. I am responsible for all the employees and the programs that we support in this region. We’ve got employees scattered across all those programs. We do everything from the support technicians that do the hard work of maintaining the airplanes to the engineers that design and test. We have all of those different skills across all those programs. Q: They can go from program to program? A: Yes. There are always different skills (needed). For example you night have certain skills on a bomber that you wouldn’t need on a 747 but when you come down to test discipline and making sure there is a test procedure it’s pretty common. It’s one of the things the employees enjoy is they get to cross multiple platforms and work different programs. Q: When you became site manager did you have any specific goals that you wanted to get accomplished here? A: One of our goals is to look at how we can leverage the facilities and the resources we have here. This aerospace valley is obviously very strong, you have strong capabilities for test evaluation and so how we leverage that to support our customers and what we call our business partners or internal customers. Most of our programs we primarily do the test evaluation piece where they would do all the design and actual build for a new production type airplane. A good example of one of those goals was bringing the 747-8 down. I think that never would have happened without the Boeing Test & Evaluation organization and us being able to leverage the fact we have both people and facilities here to support that program when we we’re resource constrained in the Seattle area. Q: What’s the status of the X-51? A: We did do the first flight last year, approximately this time. It was a successful flight. It was the longest duration hypersonic scram jet test. We have three more vehicles that we intend to fly. We made an attempt several weeks back where we went up on a B-52 to launch and the mission was aborted just before release. They brought it back and they’ll reschedule that, we are hoping, in the next two months or so. It’s really up to the Air Force. They really set their priorities with the B-52. The vehicles are all ready to go. Q: Are unmanned aircraft the wave of the future? That seems to be a huge growth area for many aerospace companies. A: That’s kind of the joke between the engineers and the pilots that the engineers are designing the pilots out of a job. There is always the role in the pilots that fly the UAVs, they do the operations on the ground. When the vehicle is moving through airspace you have to be talking to towers and controllers. It is not like out there totally on its own. The trend you are seeing is there are areas of great market for UAVs and using them for surveillance in hostile areas as well as having been used in border protection. There is probably more and more use potentially coming down in police surveillance. When you put something up there loitering for a long time it brings some advantage. Q: Are there any particular challenges with testing those type of aircraft? A: One of the challenges with UAVs is operating in FAA controlled aerospace. We try to move those out to military restricted airspace so you have better control over what is going on. One of the initiative we are supporting with Lockheed and Northrop as well as the City of Palmdale is can we get a UAV corridor between Plant 42, which is FAA controlled airspace, out to the restricted areas, the test ranges out at Edwards? I think there is some momentum on how we can do that and we’ve had strong support from Congressman (Buck) McKeon’s office. Hopefully that will be an option down the road. Right now Northrop is flying its Global Hawks in and out of Palmdale, so there is some precedent there. Of course, that vehicle has been flying for quite some time so there is some history there. When you get some of the newer UAVs doing first flights there is a lot more concern obviously until the vehicles get proven. Q: How long has the facility has been here? A: Boeing has been here since the 1970s. There are two major programs from what I’ll call the heyday. One of them was the Space Shuttle. That has been here since the beginning. We are winding down that program. The other big program was the B1-B program, on which I worked production for a time and then transitioned into flight test operations. The F-15 was tested here, the C-17 tested at Edwards. We support the airborne laser with Northrop Grumman and Lockheed. Q: Are you excited that one of the shuttles will be coming back to California to be exhibited at the California Science Center? A: We are all excited. We really wanted to have one in Palmdale but we realize that putting it down at the Science Center is great because it will give a lot more audience being located there at the museum.