Eric Blood rubs the sleep from his eyes and stumbles to put on his clothes. Daylight is still an hour or so away. By the time the mechanical engineering major is dressed, his stomach is flip-flopping with anticipation. Moments later, the student intern at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center joins workers in an aircraft hangar for a pre-flight meeting.

Behind all of them sits the X-48B, an experimental unmanned aircraft, ready to perform maneuvers that are on the day's agenda. The flight team calmly reviews procedures and precautions, but Blood can sense that even the seasoned professionals are excited to see how the aircraft will perform.

Flight time arrives. The crew controls the X-48B by remote, and Blood watches the aircraft take to the air with a low roar. As the sun rises over the Mojave Desert, the aircraft performs that day's maneuvers flawlessly, turning and dipping and soaring through the warm, dry air. It lands without any problems, and Blood and the crew members approach it like they would a teammate who just hit a homerun.

Blood is on post-flight maintenance duty, so he gets to help turn off the aircraft and take it back to the hangar. As he works, he thinks back to a book that he used to read when he was a kid and just becoming interested in flight. The book had a cross-section illustration of an airplane, and he used to study it for hours. He would marvel at the complicated machinery and how it managed to make thousands of pounds of metal fly through the air.

With the X-48B safely in the hangar, Blood reports to his desk. He goes to work entering other aircraft maneuvers into a database that NASA engineers will use for other flights. On his break, he takes a walk and looks at some of the other aircraft on the base. A few of the pilots let him have a seat in the cockpits and show him the instruments and controls that they use. Tinkering with an array of buttons, his thoughts drift to school and the BS and MS degrees he'll have earned at Carnegie Mellon by May in part through the Roy Johns, Sr. and Margaret Eyerly Johns Scholarship. Perhaps a career in aeronautical engineering will follow? Or maybe more graduate school? Staring into the late afternoon sun through a cockpit window, he hopes to also take flight lessons so he can someday take off and soar.

This day, though, he must get back to his summer intern responsibilities; he returns to his desk, trying not to be distracted by the 747 airliner parked nearby.
Kelly Delaney (HS'09)