Air Force analysis branch at AEDC is already busy

  • Published
  • By Philip Lorenz III
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. --  By late 2010, guidance from the Arnold Engineering Development Center's (AEDC) Technical Excellence Board helped lead to the formation of an analysis branch at the world's largest and most advanced complex of flight simulation test facilities.

Dr. Ed Kraft, AEDC chief technologist and the head of the center's Technical Excellence Board, said a combination of factors led to the founding of the new branch.

"Independent evaluations are one of the tenets of current DOD and Air Force acquisition policy changes," he said. "It's what the government in general has recognized; acquisition programs have not had anybody independently evaluating systems, evaluating data, or providing guidance to the Air Force program managers when they get to critical design reviews."

Britt Covington, AEDC executive director, agrees with Dr. Kraft's assessment.

"Twenty five years ago, the contractor and government had a more robust analytical capability," he said. "We, on the government side, acknowledge our analytical capabilities have atrophied. It was time to strengthen that, and that's what this office is about."

AEDC's Air Force Analysis Branch, which was formed approximately a year ago, is already engaged in many areas of testing, evaluation and analysis work on and off base.

AEDC Fellow Dr. Bill Baker, the analysis branch chief, said his staff currently numbers 11, and has the goal of adding as many as three additional personnel.

"It has been probably 30 years since there was an analysis branch within the Air Force at AEDC," he said.

Dr. Baker, who originally came to work at AEDC in 1964, said, "I've been doing analysis for most of my career. I came to work for ARO (Arnold Research Organization) in the Propulsion Wind Tunnel Facility (PWT) where we did all kinds of testing and analysis, including missile aerodynamics, aircraft aerodynamics and later store separation."

The first challenge facing Dr. Baker was establishing the goals for the new branch.

"I set up four high-level goals," said Dr. Baker, who said he was not necessarily speaking of them in order of priority.

"The first goal was to work with the test complex representatives and their interface with the customers to help understand the big picture of what a particular AEDC test was for - if you see the big picture you might be able to make some recommendations on modifications to a given test," he said. "Our team is in place to help the test team evaluate a test plan before, during, and after project completion.

"A second goal is performing the ground test to flight test correlations."

This is being done to improve the testing accomplished in the wind tunnels, test cells and space chambers at AEDC. He gave an example of such a correlation, using the store separation work done previously on the F-22 Raptor as a part of the MASTER (Modeling and Simulation Test and Evaluation Resource) program.

"Scott Keen (Aerospace Testing Alliance (ATA)) was the lead on the F-22 store separation part of MASTER and we managed to match every one of their flight tests points with our computations, with the analysis that we had done," Dr. Baker said. "Dr. Don Malloy was the lead for the propulsion part of the MASTER program. Ground test to flight test correlation is something that is very important to AEDC to ensure that the data we are generating will correctly represent the real world that would be expected in flight test.

"Correlation with flight test data is going to be a key task that we're doing - something that our group will be concentrating on."

MASTER was a multi-year collaborative Test Investment Planning and Programming (TIPP) program between Air Force Flight Test Center, Edwards AFB, Calif., and AEDC.

Dr. Baker spoke about two goals that make up a proactive approach to test and evaluation, from concept to fielding new weapons systems.

"The third goal is doing online data analysis for some of the tests, in real time," he said. "It is important to look at the test data as it is being taken in the test cell to get a good representation of the performance of the article being tested so we can ensure high quality data. Also if anomalies in the test data are detected, then the test can be influenced to determine the source of the anomalies.

"For the fourth goal, we'll be working with ATA to help put together Integrated Test and Evaluation-type proposals. There are some tremendous analysts who are in ATA and what we'd like to do is to provide our expertise to our customers through as much analysis support as we possibly can provide to them. We've had a very successful time over the years with doing that. We want to raise awareness of what AEDC has to offer and encourage the customer, the Air Force and those under contract to them to make full use of that expertise."

Dr. Baker said another challenge of establishing the branch was finding the right people to carry out the mission.

"When I came on board in the middle of September (2010), I started looking for my senior leaders," said Dr. Baker, who felt fortunate to find two people already at AEDC. "I was able to hire Dr. Milt Davis (another AEDC Fellow) for my Aeropropulsion lead and Dr. Don Malloy as my Flight Systems lead."

Dr. Baker, who is the acting lead for the Space and Missiles part of the branch, said finding the expertise to staff the Space and Missiles lead position was particularly challenging.

"The sensor world is kind of a whole different animal and I looked around all over the country, from the Missile Defense Agency to the laboratories and I just wasn't able to come up with someone who had the unique capabilities we need," he recalled.

This position is still open and will be filled at a later date.

Dr. Baker said despite AEDC's strong reputation for its high caliber of past analysis work, there must be a continual effort to re-establish that reputation.

"A continuing challenge will be marketing AEDC's analysis capabilities, especially during the ongoing financial constraints in an uncertain global economy," he said. "We will constantly be talking to people and telling them what our capabilities are and what we can do. That's something that you have to re-establish continually because you can have a great reputation with one program office or one program. Then the next program comes along and those contacts have all disbanded, they've gone into other programs, so you've got to be reminding them, 'hey, look what AEDC did for you last time.'"

He added, "If you can do that, then you can keep a good strong analysis program going, but you have to go down to Eglin AFB or out to Edwards AFB, go up to Wright Field and talk to them on a regular basis."

Dr. Baker said AEDC's analysis branch is already busily and constructively engaged on multiple fronts and acknowledges a lot remains to be done to bring it up to its full potential.

"We're a young branch" he said. "We've got some highly experienced people as leaders, and we are developing our young analysts as we go. In some of the analysis that we're doing, we're in a learning mode and in others we already have the experience and are making significant contributions."

Covington is looking forward to what the Air Force Analysis Branch will achieve in the long term. He wants Arnold to be recognized for all that it has to offer the user.

"Most of the people think of AEDC as a large industrial complex, whose capabilities revolve around our test infrastructure and facilities," he said. "Yes, that's part of what AEDC is about. But I think our intellectual capital brings as much to the table, if not more, than the big iron we have around here.

"If we're going to be a development center as opposed to a test center, this analysis and evaluation office and other work that we do here is part and parcel to developing weapons. I've worked in several system program offices, aircraft and other systems as well. They don't have all the engineers they need to develop systems and certainly not all the variety of engineers needed. They rely on other offices to support and help the particular weapons systems they organically support."

He said AEDC is fortunate to have ground test professionals on both the government side and ATA to support ground test evaluation and analysis. Covington said it is not a duplication of effort but a confidence multiplier for the customer.

He also sees value for the officers who will become part of the analysis branch, even for a single tour of duty.

"The types of things that they're learning can certainly be exported throughout the Air Force should they choose to leave middle Tennessee and go to work at Wright-Patterson or Tinker AFB or Hill AFB or any other place," he said. "This is a great proving ground and incubator for the intellectual capital we have here. But it'll allow folks who have been here, who understand what we do and how important it is to the acquisition system or process, to get out and spread the word."