Tag: Starr Ginn

SWE Diverse Podcast: Starr Ginn – 2023 AIAA AVIATION Forum

By SWE Diverse Podcast
Originally Published 19 April 2023 by Society of Women Engineers

On this episode of Diverse, SWE President Dayna Johnson sits down with Starr Ginn, the Advanced Air Mobility Lead Strategist at NASA, and discusses the upcoming 2023 AIAA AVIATION Forum and reflects on her journey to NASA.

Diverse: a SWE podcast · EP 212: Starr Ginn- 2023 AIAA Aviation Forum

About Starr Ginn
Starr Ginn is the Advanced Air Mobility Lead Strategist which is responsible for maintaining a “strategic view” of the larger AAM ecosystem wide movement to include advances in industry aircraft, airspace and infrastructure investment and capability; the developing and proposed regulatory framework for implementing change to support AAM missions; the role and participation of standards bodies involvement supporting AAM operations; and the movement and direction of NASA projects participating in the AAM Mission. In this role she leads the development of an implementable strategy for project direction and focus to enable the fulfillment of NASA’s Initial Automation Prototype while also advising and maximizing benefit to industry partners, regulatory bodies, and standards groups.
For the last three years, Starr Ginn led the planning, development, and execution of the Advanced Air Mobility National Campaign (AAM NC) series, which consists of flight testing an experimental AAM Eco System of novel eVTOL and cargo vehicles, infrastructure, and airspace management technologies in the context of increasingly complex safety scenarios enabled by automation.
Starr has 27 years of experience conducting one-of-a-kind flight tests. Starr has a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering and Master of Science Degree in Aerospace Engineering.

How to Speed to Prototype

Panelists: Moderator Starr Ginn, deputy aeronautics research director, NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center; Charles “Chase” Ashton, senior engineer, AeroVironment Inc.; Scott Drennan, director of innovation, Bell; Steve Ericson, director of advanced design, The Spaceship Co.; Bob Morgan, director of research and development, Scaled Composites; Michael Swanson, chief engineer, Advanced Development Programs, Lockheed Martin

by Michele McDonald, AIAA Communications Manager

AIAA AVIATION Forum, Atlanta, June 25, 2018 – Moving quickly from aerospace design to prototype can be daunting, but a few key principles may help: keep it simple; fail early and often; use existing technology; and perhaps most essential, have a great team.

A panel of aerospace experts outlined some key factors for a successful and fast prototype launch June 25 during the “Rapid Spiral Development From Ground to Flight” session at the 2018 AIAA AVIATION Forum in Atlanta.

Scott Drennan, director of innovation at Bell, said there’s a lot to learn from getting your hands on hardware because it feeds back into the design.

“I’m a big believer in the build,” he said.

Charles “Chase” Ashton, an aeromechanical engineer with AeroVironment Inc., said team members with many hands-on skills and who are “masters of some” are crucial to the success of a fast-moving project.

“We not only design [the prototypes] and build them, but have the ability to test them as well,” Ashton said.

Bob Morgan, director of research and development at Scaled Composites, said doing the work in-house, without relying upon contractors, helps speed the path to prototype; he advised not to design something you can’t build yourself.

Morgan added that companies should keep it simple and resist design changes late in the process because they add cost and time. Look at what really needs to be done and then add from there, he said, adding that the simplest answer can be surprising.

For example, Morgan said, a prototype aircraft with a pilot can be faster to prototype than an unmanned system, depending on the size of the aircraft.

“Sometimes it’s easier to stick a guy into it,” he said.

Another tenet: “Fail early and fail often,” Morgan said. Fixing problems early saves time and money.

In addition, reuse what you know, Michael Swanson, chief engineer of Advanced Development Programs at Lockheed Martin, said, adding that costs can be reduced by a factor of four by simply using existing parts and technology. Skunk Works tries to bite off only one miracle per aircraft program, Swanson joked.

Building trust with the customer also helps shave time from design to prototype, said Steve Ericson, director of advanced design with The Spaceship Co.

Embedding the customer within the team builds trust and speed, Ericson said. He explained that when he worked on a project that required nine prototypes built to production standards, the customer was a part of meetings and already knew about any failures and what was being done to fix them.

Keeping the customer close eliminates “having a Power Point battle,” Ericson said.

Panelists agreed that during this rapid process, both the team and the customer must have a high tolerance for risk and failure.

“It’s not for the faint of heart,” Swanson said.

Video

All 2018 AIAA AVIATION Forum Videos

New Technology Won’t Replace X-Plane Pilots

Panelists: Moderator Starr Ginn, deputy aeronautics research director, NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center; Edward L. Burnett, senior fellow, Modeling, Simulation, and Controls, Lockheed Martin; Robert E. Curry, chief scientist, Armstrong; Bill Gray, chief pilot, U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School; Nils Larson, chief, Flight Crew Branch, Armstrong; Daniel Murri, NASA technical fellow for flight mechanics, NASA’s Langley Research Center; Dana Purifoy, director of flight operations, Armstrong; Art Tomassetti, director and F-35B U.S. Marine Corps program manager, Lockheed Martin

by Tom Risen, Aerospace America staff reporter (2017-2018)

X-Planes-panel-AVIATION2017 — Participants in the panel discussion, “X-Planes: Discovery Through Flight,” June 5 at the 2017 AIAA AVIATION Forum in Denver.

Some aircraft engineering obstacles remain impossible to discover without building an experimental X-plane and sending a pilot to fly it, despite advances in ground testing and remote-controlled flight, a group of scientists and test pilots told the 2017 AIAA AVIATION Forumin Denver.

Flight simulators and wind tunnels have long been used to test an aircraft’s design before the final product is built, but they cannot always re-create the way planes will fly in real life, representatives from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and Lockheed Martin explained June 5 during the “X-Planes: Discovery Through Flight” forum.

The X-35, which the Defense Department tested in a joint operation as a prelude to the F-35, taught the military how to improve the jet’s hovering thrusters, said Art “Turbo” Tomassetti, who flew both planes for the Marine Corps. Tomassetti retired from the Marines in 2013 and is now the F-35B Marine Corps program manager at Lockheed Martin.

Tracking how more than 18,000 kilograms of thrust from lift fan of the X-35 caused it to stall in real life was “extremely difficult if not impossible to model” without a test plane, Tomassetti said. Pilot feedback about flight experiences like landings and cockpit controls is also important for design improvements, he added.

Bill Gray, chief test pilot at the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School, said test pilots will always be necessary, but “autonomy is kind of where we are headed,” despite some fears from the aviation community that remote piloting will replace humans.

However, unmanned X-planes are often not less expensive or more efficient than sending a test pilot, said Dana Purifoy, director of flight operations for NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center.

“You have to be careful in deciding what you want to obtain and whether it is worth it to use [unmanned planes],” Purifoy said.

Situations where unmanned X-planes could be useful include long-endurance tests and high-risk flights of unproven aircraft, said Nils Larson, the chief test pilot at Armstrong.

NASA is approaching the preliminary design review process as a prelude to building an X-plane to test low-boom supersonic flight, a NASA spokesman said. There is no timeline for the design review, but NASA expects the process to be complete by the end of June.

Video

All 2017 AIAA AVIATION Forum Videos