May 2025 | Michael Fechter

Alumni networks can be vital links to a university’s recruiting and fundraising. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s alumni helped land two major manufacturing operations in the past year, both of which stand to bring high-paying jobs to Volusia County and help train the aviation and aerospace workforce’s next generation.

Boeing is about to open a new engineering center at the CiCi and Hyatt Brown Center for Aerospace Technology in Embry-Riddle Research Park to serve its Defense, Space and Security wing. The aviation giant promises to bring at least 400 new jobs with it.

“We do really cool stuff — I just can’t tell you what the cool stuff is,” joked Steve Nordlund, recently retired Boeing Air Dominance vice president and general manager.

Nordlund, a 1990 Embry-Riddle graduate who serves on the school’s board of trustees, said its location — about 64 miles north of the Kennedy Space Center — was a key factor in the company’s decision where to expand.

But “the main driver was there’s no better talent in the country, in my opinion, than an Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University graduate,” he says. “Being able to grab that talent and have them literally walk across the street and have a seamless integration into the largest aerospace company in the world just made a lot of sense for us.”

Embry-Riddle graduates have the highest retention rates within the company, he says. “When we get them, they’re likely to stay. And that’s because of the passion of aviation/ aerospace and because of the passion of what companies like Boeing do.”

Boeing soon will be joined by Aura Aero, a French company that makes hybrid and electric aircraft, including 19-seat planes designed for short hops. Construction should start next year on a 500,000-sq.-ft. manufacturing and assembly plant on Daytona Beach International Airport property near Embry-Riddle Research Park. It also will serve as the company’s U.S. headquarters.

Aura Aero predicts 1,000 new jobs with an average salary above $70,000 when the plant opens in 2028. The company hopes to build 100 of its hybrid-electric planes per year.

The agreement to build the plant follows a 2023 memo of understanding that Aura Aero signed with Embry-Riddle, creating a pilot training and an internship program to prepare people to fly and manufacture the company’s emerging technology-driven planes.

Financial incentives played a role in both deals. But trust in Embry-Riddle’s students and the hands-on training they receive were significant factors.

“Very excited and proud of this partnership between Aura Aero and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, where I completed my aerospace engineering studies!” Aura Aero chief of staff Antoine Blin wrote in a 2023 LinkedIn post after the training program was announced.

Learning by Doing

That confidence is well-grounded. In a nine-month period starting in December 2023, Embry-Riddle students put cameras and other communications hardware on a suborbital flight, a manned Blue Origin mission, and became the first students to put a payload on the moon.

“All of those (missions) are very different regimens,” says Embry-Riddle Space Technologies Lab Director Troy Henderson, “so being able to capture that not just in hardware, but software requirements, all the interfacing requirements, all the lifetime requirements, all the operations, all the post-processing has been pretty incredible.”

Last September, a camera manufactured by Henderson’s students flew aboard a Polaris Dawn mission led by astronaut Jared Isaacman, an Embry-Riddle alumnus. In January, President Trump nominated Isaacman, who also is a billionaire founder of a payment processing company, to be the new NASA administrator. The camera with two wide-angle lenses was called LLAMAS, which stands for “Literally Looking at More Astronauts in Space.”

“This is what happens,” Henderson deadpans, “when you let students name projects.” It was designed to shoot videos and still pictures inside the ship during its five-day mission. Those images were used to create virtual reality simulations that crew members reported “was the closest thing to being in the capsule without actually being in it.”

EagleCam, which rests on the lunar surface today, garnered more attention. Embry-Riddle students worked with Houston-based space exploration, infrastructure and services company Intuitive Machines to develop a multi-lens camera that was supposed to land ahead of the 14-foot-tall Odysseus lander to provide the first images of a lunar landing looking up from the moon’s surface. If successful, it would also have marked the first use of Wi-Fi on the moon.

The payload did eject, but not as originally planned, and there were problems getting the signal to beam the images back to earth. But it was still a success, Henderson says, noting that the payload “survived launch loads, the vacuum environment, the thermal environment, the radiation environment — which was a huge deal.” In addition, the antenna constructed in an adjacent Embry-Riddle lab “is now kind of the NASA protocol for Wi-Fi.”

“We trained 40 students on how to ... design, build, test, integrate and operate a spacecraft. And every single one of those students as far as I know is either employed or in a graduate school of their choosing.” — Troy Henderson, director of the Embry-Riddle Space Technologies Lab

“For us here now, to be able to go, ‘Hey, we built something that went to the moon, built something that flew to 120 km altitude and back, and we built something that flew on a human flight,’ that’s unheard of,” Henderson says. “There are universities and faculty that will fly three things over the course of their career and we did it in nine months. And we’re standing up the team to do it again.”

Forty students — including undergraduates, master’s and Ph.D. candidates — worked on EagleCam, learning how to design, build, test, integrate and operate a spacecraft. And they learned a key lesson, which is that space travel can be filled with frustrations and setbacks.

It’s great to see students get excited and committed to a project knowing it will get to the moon. But there are “things you can’t teach,” he says, like working in a hot, confined space, and keeping focused when things don’t go right. “But then, how do we walk through disappointment together that, ‘Hey, we’re not going to deploy together as planned but we’re going to do this other thing instead? How do we shift this way a bit?’ There were a lot of lessons learned.”

As Henderson spoke, one of the EagleCam students was hard at work next door in Embry-Riddle’s Wireless Devices and Electromagnetics Laboratory (WiDE). Graduate research assistant Jayaprakash Shivakumar was testing how 3D-printed ceramics — the materials used to make the EagleCam antenna — hold up to the high temperature, high radiation conditions that come with space flight.

The ink coating can crack, so they’re testing whether gold, which is inert, would be more durable.

Shivakumar, a Ph.D. student, knew he wanted to work on satellites and came to Embry-Riddle from India after researching which U.S. universities were best for aerospace. “This is all I wanted to do,” he says, “so I’m enjoying it.”

He was recruited to the WiDE lab by director Eduardo Rojas-Nastrucci, who mentored Shivakumar during the EagleCam project.

“Hands-on learning. That’s really the theme” at Embry- Riddle, Rojas says. Aerospace companies routinely bring projects to the university even though they’re capable of doing the work in-house. “But they are always looking for workforce — trained students. So that’s when the university brings value. They need people, they don’t have enough people in this field. We tell them, if we work with you — give us something that you’re working on, we’ll set up a project and help you a little bit and you have a student that is great.”

Rising Opportunities

In a nearby hangar, Embry-Riddle students are experimenting with advanced air mobility systems, working to ensure safer flying for everything from EVTOLs and drones to electric planes. Complementing Aura Aero’s interest, hybrid and electric aircraft are among those being tested.

“Many of (the students) may be concerned about the environment and they want to see technologies and the industry progress in a more sustainable way,” says Kyle Collins, director of the Eagle Flight Research Center. “I think that really draws a lot of the students that we have here.”

Master’s student Riley Cox-Gross, 27, focuses on aerodynamics and electric propulsion. He has worked at Eagle Flight since he was an undergrad, most recently developing a control software program for a distributed electric propulsion system. In it, electric motor-driven propellors are placed on the front of a wing to enhance lift during short takeoffs or landings. But what happens if the electricity fails? Cox-Gross, a Jupiter resident who wants to be a test pilot, was creating preprogrammed circling maneuvers to give the system a chance to reconnect. If that fails, a parachute can deploy to slow descent.

The work is for a contractor working on a NASA research program.

“There’s only a handful (of schools) around the world that do this kind of research, especially this kind of handson stuff,” Cox-Gross says.

Collins’ students, including Cox-Gross, are working with a smaller version of a Cessna 182 — a little more than a third of the size, weighing about 150 lb. — to determine where best to mount propellors to maximize air flow over the wings. Each location must be tested to determine its efficacy.

“It’s like getting in a car and feeling out a system,” Cox- Gross says. “It’s a computational way of absolutely figuring out exactly how a system behaves by shaking it, twisting it, bopping it, turning it, (at) different frequencies. Finally if you do it enough times and all the axes, you get numerical (data) that tells you exactly how the system behaves.”

And that’s not something students can learn in a classroom.

As Florida’s space industry grows, student development opportunities should grow, too. Henderson says his team still feels that rush of pride about EagleCam — occasionally texting each other, “The moon’s full tonight and we’re still up there.” They likely will be again.

He is putting together a new team to build a second EagleCam to fly on a future Intuitive Missions’ moon landing. Its CEO, Steve Altemus? An Embry-Riddle alumnus.

About Embry-Riddle

HISTORY

1925: Embry-Riddle Co. is formed, providing services ranging from airmail to travel planning.

1939: Embry-Riddle School of Aviation opens at Miami’s Municipal Airport.

1965: Embry-Riddle relocates to Daytona Beach. 1970: Two years after receiving accreditation, the school’s name becomes Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

CAMPUSES:

Daytona Beach, Prescott, Ariz., and a worldwide online program

TOTAL ENROLLMENT: 32,103

DAYTONA BEACH ENROLLMENT:

8,755 total; including 3,173 in the College of Aviation and 3,385 in the College of Engineering

COSTS (Daytona Beach):

$69,000 per year for undergraduates, including tuition, books, fees and on-campus housing

Source: Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

A Rocketing Sector

Florida boasts the fastest-growing manufacturing sector of any state in the nation, and aviation and aerospace are a key part of that success.

With a robust space infrastructure that includes Kennedy Space Center and numerous military installations, the Sunshine State is a natural hub for the aviation and aerospace industry. It has a solid cluster of aircraft and aircraft component manufacturers. It’s also a major center for flight training as well as maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) operations. Florida boasts nearly 800 MRO companies that employ about 20,000 Floridians. It’s the top MRO sector in the nation, in fact, generating $6 billion in annual revenue.

Advanced manufacturing — which includes additive manufacturing, or 3D printing — also is gaining traction. Key companies in the emerging subsector include Sintavia, L3Harris / Aerojet Rocketdyne, Rapid Prototyping Services, Siemens Energy and Materials Solutions. Meanwhile, companies such as Redwire (formerly Made in Space), nScrypt and Sidus Space are working with the International Space Station National Lab on new manufacturing techniques for microgravity environments.

Florida’s Space Coast also hosts operations of many of the nation’s major commercial space providers, including SpaceX, Blue Origin, Relativity Space, Stoke Space, Firefly, Vaya Space and United Launch Alliance.

Here’s a glance at some of the manufacturing sector’s major players:

Aviation and Aerospace:

Amazon Kuiper, Airbus Satellites, Blue Origin, L3Harris, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky, Leonardo, Embraer, Piper, Textron, Chromalloy and Collins Aerospace, among others

Defense Contractors:

Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (RTX), General Dynamics, BAE Systems, L3Harris, General Electric, Honeywell and SAIC, among others

Note: L3Harris and Lockheed Martin appear twice because the diversified conglomerates operate multiple businesses. Source: FloridaMakes, a National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership program

Direct Route

Micah Parrilla, 22, from Deltona, completes his bachelor’s degree this spring and his master’s a year from now. He’s all but assured to have a job waiting for him with Flexjet, a private aviation management company with offices in Embry-Riddle’s MicaPlex research park, after working as a software development intern the past two years.

The internship program was built by Embry-Riddle alumnus Michael Campobasso, who was hired after meeting Flexjet’s chief technology officer, also an Embry-Riddle graduate, at an entrepreneurship competition.

For Parrilla, classroom instruction can be “on like a surface level. And then when you get to come in here, it gets deeper and more actually applicable to what the industry expects you to know.”

He wasn’t sure where he wanted to go to school, but his father, an aviation fanatic, pushed him toward Embry-Riddle. Parrilla says he’s glad he did. “A lot of friends who went to those (state) schools, they complain about over-crowdedness, the difficulty of finding a job and also not getting as involved training in their undergrad,” he says. “I’m comparing that to myself now. … I kind of got lucky with a lot of the things the school is offering me.”

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