1. Aircrew
2. Ground crew
3. Management team
4. Tech experts

It takes the coordinated effort of hundreds of people to make dreams take flight, and this is just a small sample of the amazing team members you will get to work with in a flight test career.

Aircrew
Aircrew includes loadmasters, like those depicted, flight test engineers, instrumentation engineers, test pilots, test conductor, test director, aerial photographers, flight surgeons, and many more.

Ground Crew
The ground crews support the test team in countless ways–maintenance personnel, both crew chiefs on the line and back shop systems experts and supervisors, logistics test teams, and other support personnel.

Management Team
Business analysts, program managers, executive assistants, operations schedulers–this team is the oil that keeps the flight test machine running and the gas in the fuel tank. Our magnificent airplanes would just be drawings on a page if we didn’t have plans, programs, and payment. This part of the team is truly the rest of the iceberg, the enormous part hidden beneath the surface.

Tech Experts
Sitting behind desks strewn with slide rules, blueprints, schematics and the like is a host of engineers and scientists who might not even see the airplanes fly, but their input in the smallest details ensures that the ideas get off the ground.

The fact is, we need you on one of these teams. Which one would you like to hear more about?

Don’t just imagine your dreams–explore them, because we need you. The aerospace industry needs innovators. The flight test community is looking for the next Neil Armstrong, and that’s what this column is about, helping you take that next small step.

Thanks for reading Launch Your Flight Test Career #8. Send a message to @FlightTestFact on Twitter to ask questions about launching your flight test career.

More articles in this series: Previous

Dassault Falcon does a great job explaining how to design airplanes in a way that prevents the need for aerodynamic bandaids here.

This editorial recounts one pilot’s love-hate relationship with vortex generators.

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Anti-Shock Body
The anti-shock body is a pod or fairing used to reduce wave drag at transonic speeds.

The Convair 990 in this NASA photo was an early, high speed transport plane used by NASA in shuttle landing gear research and as an aerial observatory. The top, trailing edge of each wing has large anti-shock bodies.

This Gloster Meteor is an NF-11 variant with an anti-shock body on its tail.

The C-17A pictured here illustrates an alternative to the above pictured anti-shock bodies, which is to shape the flap fairing appropriately to achieve the same design effect. This is how most modern designs incorporate the anti-shock body design principle.

Vortilion
This leading edge device is similar to a stall fence or wing fence and also prevents spanwise flow of air on the wing, as seen on this Hawker 850XP.

Vortilons were also incorporated on the DC-9 to prevent deep stall, as reported here.

Airplanes by Design features photographs of aircraft from a test pilot perspective, highlighting aeronautical engineering characteristics and flight test facts. To see all of the these pictures (and many more of this aircraft and it’s unique design characteristics), click here. You will always be able to access any of these pictures by selecting the Flickr icon in the top menu bar.

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