AEDC's Tom Hartvigsen: Aerobatic pilot takes to the sky Published Sept. 2, 2011 By Philip Lorenz III AEDC/PA ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. -- To say that Tom Hartvigsen wanted to be a pilot long before he came to work at AEDC is an understatement. He had his sights on being a pilot from the age of three. Hartvigsen, an engineer with ATA's Projects and Design Engineering Department, said when he was a young child he loved watching "Flight," a TV documentary series on flight. "It was a show about various aspects of flying and test flying and they showed dropping of the X-1 from the B-29, stuff like that," he recalled. "I had to see every episode of that." Hartvigsen's interest in flying also included model airplanes. "My older brother, John, was interested in model airplanes and I saw what he had and I said, 'I've got to have one of those,'" he said. "So I started building my own, too. And John actually taught me how to fly my first control-line model." His focus on flying continued through high school and beyond. "I originally started out to be a pilot," he said. "I wanted to be an airline pilot. About the time I got into college, the bottom fell out of the airline pilot market." Science was another one of his passions. "I was always interested in science; I mean science was my best subject at school, by far," Hartvigsen said. "I had a really good advantage in that in that my grade school science teacher was really good. He was like Mr. Wizard. And he was just a really good teacher and taught us the right stuff at that level, and at that age. So, I got a really good foundation in science from that I think. And of course I was always keenly interested in it, since I was three years old." When Hartvigsen began attending Parks College of St. Louis University for an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering, learning to fly was still a goal. "I always had the notion that I was going to eventually get my pilot's license no matter what, even if I didn't get to be an airline pilot," he said. "I was going to get a pilot's license and going to do some flying. At Parks College it was really easy because just about every other room in the dormitory had a flight instructor in it and time was cheap at the airport." Scott Hatlestad, another student in his dorm, was Hartvigsen's first flight instructor. "He had a big influence on my early flying career," Hartvigsen said, acknowledging that his interest in flying went beyond getting a private pilot's license. "I was interested in aerobatics ever since I was a small child too. And of course my model airplanes were aerobatic as well." When he first came to AEDC in 1974, Hartvigsen was involved with mechanical design for the wind tunnels. Ironically, that allowed him to do some work that reminded him of the time he had spent on model airplanes. "I was actually doing a wide variety of work, but some of it was design of wind tunnel models (aerodynamic wind tunnel models)," he said. "But I was in a group that did a lot of stuff and we were working in the research areas, too. And I did a lot of arc heater parts and some of the stuff for the MHD (magneto-hydrodynamic) generator. It was all design and I'm still doing design engineering." Then in 1976, Hartvigsen took an experimental flight mechanics short course at UTSI that brought him into contact with someone he never expected to meet. "That was just a really neat course," he said. "Most of the guys in the course were test pilots. We had lectures [from different people] like Neil Armstrong. "He gave a really good lecture on techniques for test flying and had some really good movie footage of one of his test flights [that] didn't go so well. It was of the LLRV (Lunar Landing Research Vehicle), a test vehicle for simulating the Lunar Lander." He met and connected with some of the pilots in the class, too. Although Hartvigsen got his pilot's license in 1971, he didn't fly that many hours and flew in rental planes. "Before I got my own plane, I probably only had about 150 hours total," he said. Another speaker at the UTSI experimental flight mechanics short course was Bill Kershner, a Navy veteran and experienced aerobatic pilot in Sewanee, Tenn. "During the experimental flight mechanics short course, he [Bill] did the spin part of it and he both lectured and we got to go up in his Cessna 150 Aerobat and do some spins," Hartvigsen said. "Since I was a pilot at that time he let me initiate and recover from the spins and we were doing deep spins, five-turn spins - that was neat." In 1988, Hartvigsen took his first introductory aerobatic flying lesson from Tom Adams in a Pitts S-2B. "As soon as he got to full throttle, that's when I said 'I've got to have one of these,'" Hartvigsen recalled. It wasn't until the spring of 2001 that Hartvigsen started taking regular aerobatic instruction with Ray Williams in Ashland City, Tenn., and working toward being checked out for solo flying in a Pitts S-2B. By August 2002, Hartvigsen had his own plane, a Pitts S-2B and an endorsement to fly it solo. He flew that plane until 2005, when fuel exhaustion forced him to make an emergency landing in a plowed field and the plane flipped over. His insurance adjustor elected to classify the aircraft as totaled. Then in June 2006, Hartvigsen bought another Pitts S-2B and resumed aerobatic training and contest flying, "Of course, with revised fuel management techniques after that experience," he said. A member of the Atlanta chapter of the International Aerobatics Club (IAC), he said. "We put on a contest every year - actually this year we're doing two contests." Hartvigsen emphasized that the IAC competitions are a lot different than air shows. "What you're doing is a prescribed set of figures that must be done very precisely and they're judged by, typically, five scoring judges," he said. "They're watching from the ground while you do your sequence up in the air." He can't use instruments, nor is he allowed to have gyro instrumentation in the airplane. "It's all visual and that's part of the challenge," he said. Hartvigsen enjoys the social aspects of aerobatic flying. However, what keeps him coming back to compete is the challenge of taking it to the next level. Positive and negative Gs are part of the sport and both man and machine are ready for those forces. "You have to be conditioned for it [and] you've got to have an airplane that is designed to withstand that kind of G loading," he said. "My airplane is equipped with inverted fuel and oil systems and has symmetrical airfoils on the wings and so it can fly upside down just as well as it flies right side up." Competitive, aerobatic flying is divided into five contestant categories based on ability; primary, sportsman, intermediate, advanced and unlimited. Hartvigsen is already thinking ahead. "I'm going to stay in sportsman this year, but I'm probably going to advance to intermediate next year," he said. "I may not go any higher than intermediate because that's pretty challenging, especially for a person of my age." Hesitating only a few moments, he adds, "Intermediate may be as high as I'll go, but then, I never know."