About Bernardo Malfitano

Hi. My name is Bernardo Malfitano, and this is my website.

I am a life-long aviation nut. Since I was a little kid, I used to love watching airliners, helicopters, fighters, ultralights, and banner-towing Cessnas fly around Rio. As soon as I could read, I devoured every book I could fly about the history of aviation and the technological devices that allow these magical contraptions to lift them themselves into the air. I watched – and recorded – dozens of hours of documentaries about aviators, air battles, aviation history, specific aircraft types, and next-generation technologies. I was motivated to learn science and math since every scrap of new understanding in those areas shed light into the performance characteristics and the design decisions that shape flight. At fifteen, I saw one of the first public flights of a new prototype military trainer. Imagining the pride of the airplane’s makers in seeing their invention fly, the creativity and expertise and analysis required to create it, led me to believe that there is nothing else I would rather work with. I have since spent my life pursuing and appreciating the sleek lines, graceful movements, and powerful sounds of aircraft, the skills required in the cockpit as well as at the drafting table, wind tunnel, and factory. I am a semi-professional aviation photographer and author (a hobby to which this website is dedicated), an aviation artist, I build and fly model aircraft, I fly simulators on my PC, I have done research in aerodynamics, I have spent time in the lab modeling and building and testing and tuning aero engines of all kinds (from old piston engines to hybrid rocket engines like SpaceShipOne’s, to the unusual jet engines in the SR-71 and X-35B), I’m getting my Masters in aerospace engineering, I volunteer at air museums, I have contributed to several aviation-related websites and books and magazines and TV shows, I’m a student pilot, I have flown in diverse aircraft (from a D-25 open-cockpit biplane to an L39 jet fighter trainer, from huge C-17 military transports to a tiny high-powered aerobatic airplane, as well as small Cessnas and Pipers and even some ultralights; one 3-axis, one trike, one and para-glider)... Oh yeah, and for 40 hours a week I work as a structural engineer at the world’s premier commercial-jet development and manufacturing site. My work involves refining our models (i.e. our equations and computer simulations) of fatigue and crack growth, i.e. sharpening our understanding of how aero structures age, where cracks (or delamination or other kinds of damage) appear and how fast they grow, and how (and how often) airplane structures need to be inspected so that damage is caught before things snap apart. In other words, I help to make sure that this or this or this or this don’t happen to you when you’re flying a Boeing or Douglas jet. Some of the work involves figuring out how to keep old jets flying safely (some Boeing jets have been flying for over 50 years and 100,000 flights), some involves experiments on composite materials and new structural shapes so we can know which ones to use on our next generation of commercial jets. I’m pretty lucky to have made it this far this fast, and every day I appreciate that it’s awesome to be where the action is, contributing to the future of aviation technology and seeing it take shape before my eyes. Science, Freedom, Beauty, Adventure... What more could you ask of life?

As for how I got here...

I was born in Rio de Janeiro, where I lived for the first 11 years of my life. My father works for a multinational, which moved us to Connecticut for my middle-school years. When I was 14 we returned to Rio, where I was lucky enough to attend the British School during my high-school years; It’s a wonderful school, a small tight-nit community, where academic standards are high but creativity and the pursuit of constructive interests (such as topology, backpacking, stand-up comedy, running, and studio art) are not just encouraged but actively fueled. My work (and play – I’m one of those people for whom “play” is relatively systematic) there got me into Stanford University, where I spend a wonderful four and a half years (Why hurry?) getting my engineering B.S., as well as learning how to dance, compose short stories, ski competitively, boomerang, write code, publish academic research papers, navigate the intricacies of romantic relationships, play percussion instruments for a marching band, and other fun and useful things.

I also learned how to teach – including tutoring, mentoring, classroom management, curriculum development, and all those little details about how to keep a room-full of young people from nodding off while you explain complicated things for an hour. I created and taught a course about the history of aviation technology (which aimed to explain to non-engineers why airplanes are designed the way they are, why different airplanes use different design features, and how these design features were introduced over time). I also led a “Science Of Sports” summer camp at the Tech Museum in San Jose, I taught Health & Life Skills once a week to a sixth-grade class for a year, I mentored a great kid in a “Big Brothers Big Sisters”-type program, did one-on-one SAT-prep tutoring, created and led glider-design workshops for kids of all ages, helped to develop a curriculum for science workshops that were done in Africa... Teaching is one of life’s great pleasures, and I still regularly seek volunteer opportunities to keep doing it, such as doing Career Days at schools, leading Bring Your Child To Work Day activities at Boeing, and teaching science and math in after-school programs.

After Stanford, I was not yet a US citizen, so the big aerospace companies wouldn’t even interview me, since I would not be eligible to work on a big fraction of their programs (which involve ITAR-restricted technologies and/or work that is proprietary to the US government). So for a year I worked at Google. Google was working hard to grow internationally that year (2005), so I was hired basically because I speak Portuguese and have a good technical mind. So I did things like translation, legal research, end-user support, and a little PR. While there, I picked up not only an interest in issues of intellectual property and privacy in the digital world, but also an excitement about how the internet - especially Web 2.0 platforms - are redefining how people manage knowledge and even their social lives. I carried this excitement into my aerospace career, where I evangelize about the power of good databases, and about the use of wikis and other tools that promote collaboration and knowledge-sharing.

Also around that time, I learned a lot about politics, the culture wars in the US, and how people’s misunderstandings about the nature of religious faith and spirituality prevent them from understanding each other’s world-views. Throughout my teen years I gradually moved from Catholic to angry Richard-Dawkins-style atheist and then back to a more centrist, tolerant, Unitarian Universalist naturalist. And in my early 20s I started to see how the needless gaps between different worldviews could be bridged - despite the fact that passionately intolerant voices on each extreme of the spiritual spectrum claim otherwise. So I started to write a book about this. You can read more about it here.

Also starting when I was around 20, I got a car and a decent camera, learned how to use them, and started going to every airshow and air museum in the West Coast. I started posting pictures and reviews on my university web-space, a project with eventually evolved into this website. After one of the first airshows I went to, I emailed Jim Leroy with a link to my review, and he wrote me personally and urged me to share this material in the ICAS forums, which back then was the main place where airshow fans gathered on the web. That was my introduction to the airshow community. As my photography and writing got better, I got more and more access, which led to better pictures and articles which were featured in more places, and this snowballed into my present hobby of going to airshows as “Media”/”Press” and documenting them for magazines and websites and occasionally books and TV.

I was hired into Boeing in early 2006. Boeing’s Satellite Development Center had won a big contract and needed engineers to, among other things, design and test the control systems for the satellite. Satellites pretty much fly themselves, and have to keep track of where they are, how they’re oriented, whether all systems are working well, whether anything is too hot or too cold, etc. This basically involves getting a bunch of electronic boxes to talk to each other, understand each other’s signals, and act according to certain algorithms. Not the most exciting work. Actually, it was so frustratingly difficult, I came close to quitting and giving up on engineering and becoming a teacher, but a supportive team (and the hope of one day getting to work with airplanes) kept me hanging in there. And I got to do other work as well, such as applying Lean principles to our office, and trying to figure out how to use Critical Chain Project Management to speed up the development of new satellites. After a year and a half of satellite work, I finally got transferred to Long Beach – where Douglas used to be, a facility built to make DC-3s and that also produced all kinds of aircraft from bombers and Navy jet trainers to mid-air refueling tankers and, of course, airliners and cargo transports. The FAA was about to release a new rule, strictly requiring crack-growth/fatigue analysis on every last little piece of every commercial airplane, so the groups doing that kind of work were hiring like mad (even as other parts of the company downsized significantly). I did durability and damage tolerance analysis on aircraft repairs, figuring out how long they would last and how to inspect them to make sure they weren’t coming apart prematurely. The work was interesting, intuitive, important, rewarding, and fun. It helped to feed my insatiable curiosity about how airplanes are built and operated, it taught me about the tricky tug-of-war relationships between the manufacturers and the airlines and the regulatory agencies... and it eventually got me invited to move up to Everett (just as the work at Long Beach, keeping those old Douglas jets flying, started to dry up). Now, not only do I do analysis, I help to refine the tools, methods, equations, and numbers we use to figure out the durability and damage tolerance of structures, including new shapes and new materials.

I could also list more personal things like my general outlook on life and my personal relationships with my family and friends, but... eh, not here. You can find that kind of stuff in more appropriate places.

If you'd like to get in touch with me, feel free to email me. You can also find me on Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Linkedin, Twitter, YouTube, Match.com, and FenceCheck, and you might be able to spot me contributing to and commenting on BoingBoing, submitting stuff to Slashdot, or making edits to Wikipedia. And don't forget to check out my websites about photography, airplane design, and the unnecessary culture-wars in the US between right-wing religious nuts and angry atheist warriors.

Valeu!

Bernardo