Interview with Dr. Albert Helfrick

Featured Engineer

Dr. Albert Helfrick

Dr. Albert Helfrick - Professor, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Image: The race car was completely designed and fabricated by my mechanical engineering students and competed in the “Formula SAE” collegiate competition.

How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?

When I was a young Cub Scout in the 1950s I built a crystal set with a piece of galena as the detector. The inductor was wound on an Oatmeal box, the “condenser”, today capacitor, was from an old radio, and the headphones I found in a trash can at a neighbor’s house. I strung a long wire from my bedroom to a tree in the back yard and when music and voice came from the headphones I was totally fascinated. I had to know how it all worked. To this day electromagnetic waves still fascinate me except now I can connect Maxwell’s equations to the phenomenon.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

My favorites are the old standbys that we have been using for many years that still form the basis of all electrical measurements. For steady state measurement: a multimeter. For time domain measurements; the oscilloscope, digital or analog. For frequency domain measurements; the spectrum analyzer.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

My favorite software tool is a software engineer. I hate software.

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

I have been fixing bugs since I built my first tree fort. I can’t remember one that was the hardest or trickiest. The bugs I remember are the ones I couldn’t fix. In particular I remember designing a digital delay line for a radar altimeter test set that I thought should be a “slam-dunk”. It worked; mostly. It had some strange phenomena that I could never figure out and I spent a tremendous amount of time analyzing the problems. To this day I have no idea why it had the strange behavior.

What is on your bookshelf?

Dust. The shelves that once held dozens of data books, mathematical tables, and various scientific data are nearly empty now. That information is on line now. There are a few biographies of scientists and engineers that I admire and some of my antique radios and memorabilia.

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve?

I have a lot of tricks up my sleeve and I try diligently to teach these tricks to my students. They include, the scientific method, the engineering process, documentation, attention to detail, structured analysis…………..They always work.

What has been your favorite project?

Many of my favorite projects are the ones I do at home. Those are the projects that have no griping customer or tight schedules and I can make what I want. I have been active in amateur radio for 54 years and have built a lot of equipment of my own design. One of my latest activities is bouncing signals off the moon to contact others around the world who are equally crazy. (BTW, I use a software defined radio, SDR, for my moonbounce activities but that is a love/hate relationship.)

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences?

I have had so many varied experiences and most of them are note-worthy. Some more than others; like the time I testified before Congress, or, when I was playing the part of a “spy” while attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I was working as a consultant for a consumer electronics company and was trying to determine the basic designs of our competitor’s new products while I was posing as an importer and pretending to know nothing about electronics. My stints in the courtroom as an expert witness are always memorable too. My early career was as a physicist doing radiation hardening of military systems and I spent plenty of time at reactors, accelerators, and a fast-burst reactor, which is an atomic bomb that doesn’t quite go off. All in all I have flown enough airline miles on business to go to the moon and back and still have enough left over to buy a couple of free trips.

What are you currently working on?

I am primarily an educator now. I spend my time keeping my short courses that I teach around the world up to date and my texts likewise. My specialty area is avionics which is a very dynamic field and requires constant attention to keep books and courses current.

Where you always in the field of education? If not how did you end up there?

I started out as a researcher in radiation effects on weapons systems but did not like the vicissitudes of the defense industry. I moved to a manufacturer of test equipment where I designed various test systems primarily for the then-emerging cable television industry. From there I went to a couple of avionics manufacturers. I went up the usual corporate management ladder and ended up as director of engineering of a company. The further I went up that ladder the less I liked my job. Hiring, firing, meetings, budgets, etc. did not appeal to me. I was a scientist and engineer not a baby sitter. I started my own consulting company and did that for a number of years. But consulting is a brutal life style. I was constantly on the road and clients usually call a consultant when the situation has reached a critical state.

I had taught college classes off and on since my graduate school days and had a good number of publications so I tested the academia waters and ended up at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach. But I was back on the same ladder as before and ended up as a department chair of two departments at the same time; electrical and mechanical. With a degree in physics it was assumed I understood mechanics and electrics. Having been in manufacturing for many years I had a good understanding of mechanical engineering and in a matter of a year or so I was able to hire an excellent “real” mechanical engineer to head the ME department and stayed on, until recently as head of the EE department.

How many years have you been teaching and do you meet any of your old students?

I have been teaching since graduate school days starting in 1969 as an adjunct. I have been teaching full time since 1992.

I see quite a few of my students at conferences and other industry get-togethers. When I visit companies that I know some old students are employed I give them a heads up I am coming. I get invited to their homes to see their kids and wives and new houses. They often recount when they thought I was the meanest professor ever but have since changed their minds. They remember me visiting them when they were barely out of college and asking why they weren’t in graduate school and insisting they enroll now before they got used to watching TV in the evening. They will always be my students.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

The avionics business will see significant changes and advances as the need for more airspace capacity grows.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

I think the biggest challenge to our industry, and I will make that classification very broad, is the supply of domestically-generated engineers. It seems to me that not enough young people have a deep-rooted passion for science and engineering. This is the country that went to the moon. Where is that passion today? Too much of our science and technology-related industries are run by people like me; grey haired and well past retirement age. There are young entrepreneurs, of course. But there needs to be more.

What do you do for enjoyment away from your job?

I have been an active musician since I was very young. For a number of years I carried Musician’s Union card and played professionally. As much as I love music, I knew at an early age that music would be a lousy vocation but a great hobby so I used the money from playing to pay tuition for a degree in physics. I play tuba; mostly Dixieland jazz today but over the years I have played all low brass instruments in symphonic bands orchestras dance bands and a lot of brass quintet.

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