Air Force Test Pilot School formally inaugurates Staff Fellowship Program

  • Published
  • By Maj. Chris Gahan, Ph.D.
  • 412th Test Wing
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. --  

For over eight decades, the Air Force Test Pilot School has played an integral role in America’s leadership in aerospace development. The staff at TPS is hand-selected from among the test enterprise’s best to form the next generation of test leaders, an exceptionally competitive process.

To ensure staff stay on the leading-edge and continue to drive innovation into the school curriculum, TPS has initiated a new, five-week Staff Fellowship Program with partners in government, academia and industry, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Scaled Composites, and Anduril Industries.

The Staff Fellowship Program allows instructors to gain fresh insight into how different organizations approach test and development. Fellows are then tasked with bringing back those diverse ideas and integrating them into the schoolhouse curriculum.

"To ensure our curriculum remains at the cutting edge, we must invest in our world-class faculty," said Col. James Valpiani, commandant, Air Force Test Pilot School. "This fellowship program is a deliberate investment in our most important asset—our people. It provides our instructors with diverse experiences and new approaches, which is vital for modernizing our curriculum and ensuring graduates can deliver multi-domain capabilities for the warfighter.”

Since the program’s inception, TPS has sent three staff instructors to NASA’s Johnson Space Center, including Air Force test leaders Lt. Col. Carlos Pinedo, Maj. Ali Hamidani, and Space Force test leader Maj. Stefanie Coward. All three were hosted within the Astronaut Office’s Crew Interface Rapid Prototyping Lab.

The new program is designed to benefit both the Fellow and the sponsoring organization within a complimentary fashion. As hands-on projects with real-world benefits, Pinedo advanced human-in-the-loop performance research for various developmental space vehicles with the Crew Compartment Office on the Human Landing System.

“The Fellowship collaboration between NASA and TPS is a force multiplier, establishing foundational principles for future space vehicle developmental test” notes Pinedo, senior instructor, Air Force Test Pilot School. “While at Johnson Space Center we conducted a research project utilizing Model Based HSI techniques developed at TPS to the lunar landing task. This project will help inform the development and testing of future crewed lunar lander vehicles.”

Vehicle performance characteristics were also focused on. Coward worked on synthesizing the principles of piloted aircraft handling qualities test techniques for vehicles operating in the space environment, while Hamidani worked to develop procedures for handling qualities investigations of the Orion spacecraft that will soon take humankind back to the moon.

In contrast, members of NASA also participated in the first iteration of an Air Force Test Pilot School Test Fundamentals short course, which was taught on-site at the NASA Johnson Space Center. The list of attendees included current astronauts, scientists, and engineers who are working on methodical test and evaluation of the Lunar Gateway space station, new rovers, and future space suits.

As the school continues to deliver excellence, the forthcoming cohort in summer 2025 will feature six instructors engaging with DARPA, BETA Technologies, AFWERX, along with a continued NASA collaboration for emerging space test.