Commander Eric “Turbo” Thurber will tell you his job in the U.S. Navy is training pilots to complain.
But by doing that in his day-to-day as a test pilot instructor, the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science 2004 alumnus is training the pilots who will help military aircraft evolve, including everything from flight systems to ergonomics.
“In test pilot school, the idea behind it is, I’m not the problem, the plane’s the problem,” Thurber said to a group of about a dozen current MSMS students during a Monday wellness seminar. “We’re kind of professional complainers, in that what we’ll do is take existing systems and say ‘This can be better, this can be better, and this can be better.’”
Typically, Navy pilots train to fly a particular aircraft and work around its flaws, but Thurber said test pilots train to fly all kinds of planes and find ways to optimize them to reach their highest potential. Training them means introducing them to all kinds of aircraft, from Alaskan bush planes to the higher-speed T-38.
“We let people get exposure to all these different things, because we want when they go out in the world when they’re testing something, to have something to compare it to,” Thurber said.
Test pilots learn about aircraft performance, handling qualities, flying qualities, systems integration and more, Thurber said, along with academic subjects like aeronautics, calculus, statistics, human factors and informal and formal technical reporting.
For many of those subjects, he said, MSMS set him up well.
“I remember feeling challenged in the classes, but also encouraged to reach out and do other things,” Thurber said. “I remember the cal-based physics class that let me build a catapult for mechanics. … I guess in general, it gave me the tools and a sense of the direction I wanted to go.”
After attending MSMS, Thurber followed a similar path to many test pilots, as he joined the ROTC program at Cornell university, followed by going to flight school.
Thurber then spent three years flying the C-2 Greyhound for three years. While he called it the “old pickup truck of the Navy,” he said he grew to love it over time.
“You can pick what you want to fly, and then the military is going to put you where they need,” Thurber said. “But you’re probably going to love whatever it is you end up flying. Another life lesson for me is, if you can’t get out of it, get into it.”
After going on an operational flying tour, like he did, Thurber said test pilots typically go to a test pilot school – like USNTPS, Patuxent River in Maryland, where he currently teaches.
Thurber said he has not returned to Columbus since he graduated from MSMS 20 years ago. But when he got the chance to come back to the city, planning a training event at Columbus Air Force Base, he reached out to the MSMS staff to see if he could come back to his old high school. Thomas Easterling, director for academic affairs, said he was glad to welcome Thurber back.
“We are so happy to have a graduate of the school who has done incredible things as a Navy pilot come back and inform some of our students a little bit about the kind of coursework they need for a future in physics and aeronautics and flight and ultimately, in the U.S. Navy,” Easterling said.
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