By Holy Cyrus

Featured Speaker Deborah Germak, Program Manager, FAA Technology Transfer Program, receives a certificate from Holly Cyrus

The IEEE Affinity Group, Women in Engineering, hosted a Speaker Series luncheon on February 13, 2007, at the East Bay Crab and Grille Restaurant. The honored guest was Deborah Germak, Program Manager, FAA Technology Transfer Program, who discussed the activities being conducted under the direction of Dr. Wilson Felder, Director of the Technical Center, in order to benchmark the Technical Center as a test and evaluation center for the FAA.

There are several important purposes of the exercise. Goals include fiscal accountability, alignment of the Center with ATO and NGATS work, and focusing on the “T” in the Technical aspect of the Center’s name.

A team of Technical Center employees with a wide variety of administrative, technical, and financial experience are engaged in a study to perform a quantitative and qualitative comparison of the Technical Center facilities and resources to other prominent facilities, such as NASA Ames Research Center, Edwards Air Force Base, Sandia National Laboratory, the Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center, the Naval Air Warfare Center, Aberdeen Test Center, and the Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center. The team will also provide recommendations to maintain the Technical Center as a world-class facility for aviation research, development, and verification/validation.

With the many FAA organizations located at the Technical Center, including Terminal Tower & TRACON, System Engineering, Flight Inspections, Operations Support, FAA Research & Development, and the many other organizations on the Center campus including the Federal Air Marshals, US Coast Guard, NJ Air National Guard 177 th Fighter Wing, Transportation Security Lab, and the Atlantic City Int’l Airport, along with our core of NAS Laboratories, the Tech Center is uniquely positioned with NAS Automation, Communication, Flying Laboratories, Traffic Flow, Human Factors, Weather, Navigation, Surveillance and Modeling/Simulation capabilities all under one roof.

The team is visiting the various facilities and gathering data from each of the sites in order to compare and contrast with the Tech Center. Areas of interest include general facility information, mission, recognition, workforce, physical facilities, communications, fiscal data, technology transfer, and local processes. The report is due later this spring.