simulator and, eventually, to the air traffic control simulator, located a floor below in the Business and Aerospace Building. Now a required seminar for all aerospace majors, the FOCUS Lab gives “a big leg up” to MTSU grads, Craig says. It also gives Craig the opportunity to extend his study of scenario-based training, which he began with previous NASA-funded projects in 2003. The Federal Aviation
Administration used his research to develop new standards for pilot training that emphasize proficiency rather than an arbitrary number of flight hours. “I wanted to bring scenario-based training across the entire curriculum,” says Craig. “An airline’s operation center is a place where all the aerospace disciplines intersect.” By building a replica of such a center, MTSU offers all its aerospace
All these firsts happened in “really tough budget times,” McPhee notes. What Craig estimates is $10 million in technological investment since 2003 came from bond or grant money, not the department’s budget. “Obviously, nothing much gets done without the administration’s blessing,” Craig says, “but if I’d gone in and said, ‘Hey, I’d like to have the best aerospace program in the country, but I’ll need $10 million, once they stopped laughing, I’d be out in the hall. I mean, every other department would have the same request, right?”
The fruits of flight Now that $10 million investment is paying dividends. In July 2010, the new ATC simulator was still on order, but the research and testing opportunities that it promised to deliver were enough to win MTSU a coveted place in a $6.4 billion research and engineering project called System Engineering
students the scenario-based teaching the University pioneered with its pilots. Although the FOCUS Lab is unique among aerospace programs right now, Craig says that the FAA has indicated it will mandate just this sort of interdisciplinary training in the future. That’s good news for the U.S. economy, for which the cost of flight delays alone is $33 billion a year. MTSU
2020 (SE-2020). The project is part of the FAA’s NextGen program, an ambitious plan to modernize the nation’s airspace. SE-2020 involves six industry teams, each led by a major player in aerospace. ITT Corp. leads one team, which includes MTSU— one of only two universities on ITT’s 33-member team and one of just a few universities named to the SE-2020 project overall. (Among other participants are Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and, yes, Embry-Riddle.) Under Troy Rath’s direction, the ITT team will share $1.4 billion in FAA-approved contracts over 10 years. By the end of last year, MTSU had been asked to submit three contracts for approval. MTSU’s air traffic control simulator will be critical to NextGen research as aviation moves from radar- to GPS-based technology, Dornan says. “You can’t just start using these GPS-based systems,” he explains. “Someone’s got to test them under a controlled and safe environment. Because of the sophistication of our control tower, we’re going to be the site continued on page 22
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