Angels Aircraft is a disruptive Aerospace Technology company that focuses on Affordability of Unmanned Aerial Systems. The focus areas are reduction in cost of Acquisition, Operation and Sustainment. The Affordability initiatives are developed through Automotive like approaches and design for manufacturing, autonomous operations and edge computing, swarming, distributed assets, and persistent operations. The platforms are designed to be extremely efficient while, allowing easy access to mission packages and being designed for the future to easily incorporate new technologies, while continuously supporting existing capabilties.

Primary Objective: Create a focused and reactive research and development team that operates on ROI through cost reduction, increased unit revenue, or developing competitive discriminators to drive financial performance. Leverage experience in design for manufacturing, LEAN and the Firefly approach to rapidly prove capabilities and have a future focused plan to support existing business and future contracts. • Manage technical development for Launch Vehicles, Spacecraft and Landers, to enable contract wins and for Firefly to remain competitive 3-5 years into the future.• Manage external investments in technology.• Manage makerspace and demonstration of concept capabilities for risk reduction and moving MRL and TRLs forward.

I have the privilege of supporting the Aerospace Structures Group at Firefly Aerospace. The Aerospace Structures Group is composed of the Structures Engineering Team, the Advanced Composite Manufacturing Engineering Team, The Composite Manufacturing Team, and the Corporate M&P Team that supports all Firefly M&P needs. The Structures Engineering group come up with the conceptual designs for the rocket and oversee its design, analysis, qualification and acceptance requirements and testing, and must assemble the manufacturing concept, or the way that it supposed to be build and assembled. The Structures team own the responsibility for overseeing initial development and proving the platform is capable of meeting the design requirements. The Advanced Composite Manufacturing Engineering (ACME) Team takes the handoff from Structure Engineers and brings the concept to life. This team is responsible for creating the in depth work instructions, fixtures, tooling and LEAN work cells required to produce the LRIP platforms, but they are also responsible with scaling up the work cells and factory flow, to meet full production rates as well. The Composite Manufacturing Team is the multiple shifts of Manufacturing Managers, Senior Technicians and Technicians that bring Firefly’s dreams to reality. They bring their knowledge and trade crafts to bear on our platforms to make them repeatably and reliably. Many come in, get trained up with an introductory Composite Manufacturing Certification and perfect their craft daily.The Materials and Process team work tirelessly to ensure we have proper Allowables and specifications for all materials that Firefly uses. They focus on all aspects of material characterization including acceptance, process control and populating reactive chemistry Allowables for both coupon acceptance and populating analysis material cards. They also define and bound all processes to ensure any product produced by that process will meet the requirements.

Lead Engineer for Airborne and New Product Innovation at L-3 ESSCO. John works in multifunctional teams to develop higher performance and more cost effective solutions for our customers. John is a SME in composite applications that isn't afraid to break the status quo in order to deploy new cost effective manufacturing processes to achieved the best solution. John is well versed in LEAN, additive manufacturing, VARTM, RTM, AFP, drape thermoforming, compression thermoforming, pultrusion, and autoclave manufacturing. With John's added expertise, the airborne and new product innovation teams can quickly deploy products in rapid prototyping with soft tools, utilize design to manufacture methodologies, and can achieve FAA certification utilizing Design by Simulation, with experimental validation. (Once you have a valid FEM Simulation, that has been proven, we can eliminate some of that pesky experimental validation, for minor changes or platform modifications.)

Worked in New Product Development for Automotive Applications. Developed a composite process to take advantage of light weight, strength, and the “Sizzle” associated with woven carbon aesthetics. Worked to screen potential applications, propose affordability driven techniques, and produce production scalable prototypes.

Worked as R&D Engineer focused on performance improvements on manufacturing and production parts and components focused on developing competitive discriminators and increasing manufacturing and production efficiencyMentored by LM Aeronautics VP of Strategic PlanningPrimarily worked on low cost electrically sensitive composite structures. Designed and demonstrated concepts for low cost electronically sensitive structures focused on economical designs. Able to increase damage tolerance more than 400%, over baseline structure while retaining baseline electronic properties. Incorporated into next generation prototype designs for fielded systems.

• Primary program: Qualification of rapid curing repairs for composite structureso Designed and applied different non-destructive evaluation techniques to qualify patches to an acceptable level in the field for use on Sikorsky CH-53K and compose rapid repair manuals for US Marines. Supported by Sikorsky and Department of Defense• Secondary program: Integrated Lightweight C4ISR Electronic Shelter supported by the Department of Defenseo Designed and prototyped composite structure based on baseline metallic structure. Transferred the dimension and physical properties to the composite structure, integrating phased array antennas and wiring.o Focuses on scaled manufacturing capability and limiting touch laboro Served as a Public Relations and Sales Representative for the Institute for Defense Innovation at Purdue University. Includes representing the Institute at conferences, managing exhibit space, and directing related activities.• Designed, manufactured, and processed all equipment and samples for MSE 597/AAE 590 Experimental Characterization of Advanced Composites courses• Acquired all materials necessary for the course and secured donations of composite materials for use in MSE 597 and AAE 590 courses • Built and designed all experimental apparatuses and integrated digital electronic scanning systems