Favorite Color: Red
How Many Push-Ups Can You Do? Can Do 40 Push-Ups
Favorite Snack: Cheerios and Coke (Hmmmm.)
Favorite Movie Actor: Bogart in Casablanca (Ask your parents)
Favorite Childhood Toy: "My bike and radio controlled cars."
What Color Socks Are You Wearing Right Now? "Cream."
Hobby/Recreation: "I love to go Alpine skiing."

What do you do as an engineer?
"What we do really has three phases. The planning: what are we going to do, what's the new system, how are we going to break it or find a problem with it if there is one. Then, the execution, which is by far the most exciting. You get in there and go do it. That's the flying, that's talking to the pilots, briefings and debriefings, finding problems…you're talking to a lot of people at that point. Then, there is report writing. But the report writing phase is limited by a number of days, so it doesn't really take that long. And if you've been doing execution correctly, you know what to say."

What was your most exciting day, so far?
"My most exciting day on the job was my first actual weapon delivery. I was fairly new, thought I knew what I was doing. But that's when you find out: 'yes you do, or no you don't.' So when we went up there and dropped the weapon, it came off, and it was successful. It was awesome. That's the fun part of the job."

Why do you work here and what keeps you here?
"Why am I at Edwards? Have you seen the movie 'The Right Stuff'? That is what we do here. This is the premier flight test facility in the world."

What is the latest technology you work with?
"The hottest technology I work with has to be the radar. It's no longer just sending out some energy and getting that back off an aircraft, which is called a signal return. Rather, they don't want you to detect them, so they came up with countermeasures to spoof your radar. And the radar guys said, 'Well, we can overcome that.' It's just a cat-and-mouse game…we just keep on raising the bar every time, so that we win. And that's probably the hottest technology we work with."

What happens on a day when you have a flight test scheduled?
"On the day of a flight test, you usually get in kind of early in the morning, and we do what we call a 'TM check: a telemetry check.' We pass a lot of information from the aircraft and the weapon back to the control room. There's a lot going on, and we troubleshoot that from the ground. That's usually an early morning thing. After that, we go to the brief, talk to the pilot, and go through what we call run cards. Those are a list of things we want done in a specific order, to test the different aspects of the weapon or look for something that might go wrong."

What are you working on currently?
"My current project is J-DAM integration on the F-16. J-DAM is where they took a dumb bomb and strapped a smart tail kit to it, with GPS and an inertial navigation system. You give it coordinates, and it goes there."

What kind of training will I receive?
"The training we get here…a few things are required, and others are Edwards-unique. For example, the New Engineers Training is something we have here. It goes over the various disciplines of engineering and the flight testing we do here. It's about one week a month for the first four months you are here. That's a nice overview. There are also classes out there that we take, that kind of give us a rough idea of where we fit into the larger picture."

What about career options and growth?
"There is job flexibility here. Oftentimes people will stay at a squadron for three, four, five years, and will then move on to a different area. That really gives you the opportunity to see different technologies and different aircraft. Even if you're working on the same weapon, they don't use it quite the same way on every airplane. So that kind of gives you a feel for all the different ways that the system works. Within the job itself, though, within a specific position, we're allowed a lot of latitude in what we're able to do to get the job done. That's a very nice thing for morale and job accomplishment. Someone doesn't tell you, 'Do it my way' - it's, 'Just go get the job done.' "

The technologies on base, talk about those.
"The technologies aren't found anywhere else. We're at the tip of the sword, by the time all the technologies come together in an aircraft system or weapons system. They may have existed independently someplace during their development, but by the time they get here, it's really about putting them together and getting out and testing them. That's what makes us unique."

What's the general atmosphere like?
"The base atmosphere is generally very good. Within the base, we have our squadrons: the legacy fighter squadrons, and you have the F-22s and the bombers. Each one of those areas has their own personality. And that kind of makes this place unique. Of course, we all know each other within those communities, so it gives it kind of a fraternity-style attitude."

What do you do for fun?
"On base we have a gym, workout facility, basketball courts, softball diamonds, running tracks. There are dirt bike trails for both non-motorized and motorized bikes. There is a horse riding club. My greatest personal interest is skiing. The mountains here are phenomenal. To the south of us, you have good skiing. Up north in the Eastern Sierras, there is great skiing. Mountain biking up in the Sierras is amazing. The National Parks, Death Valley, Sequoia National Park, Yosemite… if you like the outdoors, you will not run out of things to do here. There are the beaches down in L.A., about one to two hours away. You can hit Malibu, Santa Monica, Venice. About one-and-a-half or two hours away is Hermosa, Manhattan Beach."

Are the technologies and planes really unique?
"We have bombers as old as the B-52, as new as the B-2. We have our legacy fighter aircraft as well as the F-22. The JSF is going to be coming down the road here pretty soon. We're already planning and working on that. These are things that don't exist in one place anywhere else."

Why should I join Edwards?
"You should join Edwards because we play with some of the highest technologies you can get your hands on."

Is Edwards really a historic place when it comes to aviation?
"The history of Edwards Air Force base is very rich in flight testing. Flight testing really grew up here. With Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. Flight testing aircraft during the Cold War. The technology here is growing up and moving on. If you go over to the museum, you see a long list of aircraft that have been tested here. And they have some of them sitting out. It's a history book sitting there in front of you. And that was all done here."