In the Midst of Change

‘Ted’ Zavodny just does his job to help protect the United States

SINCE THE END OF WORLD WAR II, TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN CHANGING AT LASER SPEED. OSU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING, ARCHITECTURE AND TECHNOLOGY ALUMNUS DR. ALFRED “TED” ZAVODNY (BACHELOR’S IN 1962, MASTER’S IN 1965, AND DOCTORATE IN 1970; ALL IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING) HAS BEEN IN THE THICK OF IT AS GLOBAL HAWK CHIEF SCIENTIST & TRITON SENSOR CHIEF TECHNOLOGIST FOR NORTHROP GRUMMAN CORP. WE HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO VISIT WITH HIM. SOME HIGHLIGHTS OF OUR CONVERSATION:

Q: Is it true that a WWII plane landed near your family farm in Perry, Okla.?

A: I believe you are referring to the B-47 that crash-landed north of Perry. This was in the early 1950s. The B-47 was a large [U.S. Air Force] post-WWII, sixengine jet aircraft. It was the first time a B-47 three-man crew was able to safely crash-land, and the crew was able to walk away.

Q: That must have sparked an engineering interest for not only you, but the whole town.

A: The plane had minimal damage and was put on skids and towed to the airport, where it was repaired. The takeoff was announced ahead of time, and hundreds of local folks turned out to watch it.

Q: How did you decide on Oklahoma State University and specifically, electrical engineering?

A: My first two years were at Northern Oklahoma College (NOC) in Tonkawa, Okla., after which I went to OSU. I had an older brother who had gone to OSU and majored in mechanical engineering, so I decided to also major in engineering. Wanting the challenge of the hardest field of engineering, I chose electrical, which at the time I knew very little about.

Zavodny has been named to the NOC Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame.

Q: Oklahoma State University will soon begin building a new undergraduate laboratory for CEAT. It will have state-of-art technology for multiple engineering disciplines housed in a three-story world-class facility. What were the facilities like when you were on campus?

A: I began my experiments in a space on the fourth floor of the electrical engineering building, but a renovation project was soon initiated that caused me to find a new space. Somehow I was able to obtain space in the basement of the physics building, which was nearby and rather new at the time. Since there was no help available to move the equipment, I did it myself after midnight, moving some rather expensive equipment and a “stable table” block of granite that weighed about 200 pounds. Quite surprisingly, no one ever challenged the sight of all that equipment moving across campus in the dead of night.

Q: You earned your bachelor’s (top 10 in a class of 2,500), master’s and doctorate at OSU. What was your dissertation?

“A Determination of the Effect of the D ispersive Term on the Fresnel Drag Coefficient Using a Ring Laser (1970).”

Q: Can you explain the premise?

A: Here’s the simple explanation: the ring laser was a device I fabricated that held a refillable HeNe laser tube in one side of a three-sided mirror arrangement that allowed two counter-rotating laser beams to constructively interfere, producing fringes that could be counted. By introducing rotating materials within the laser beams, I was able to repeat experiments that French engineer and physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel had done 100 years earlier with significantly more precision and to extend those results to liquids to include experiments never done previously. After graduation, I left those devices with Dr. Bilger for his other graduate students to use.

Hans Bilger says his years of research with students, especially Zavodny and W.K. Stowell in the 1970s, gave him the background necessary to create an enlarged ring laser.

“Only from our extensive OSU experiments did I know the tricks to eliminate the guesswork involved in building a ring laser this big,” he says.

“Our breakthrough in ring lasers was not anticipated and, in fact, was considered impossible,” says Bilger, who presented the design to a team of scientists at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, as part of his 1986 Erskine Fellowship. New Zealand’s ring laser, the Canterbury I (C I), produced its first signals on Oct. 4, 1991. (Excerpt from “ Ring Laser Technology Circles the Earth,” CEAT Impact magazine, Vol. 3 No. 1, 1996)

Q: You’ve had a long, successful career. What was your first position post-graduation?

After getting my Ph.D., I taught math at Northern Oklahoma College for two years, worked for a laser company for two years, then went into aerospace where through a succession of five companies, I have enjoyed my work for the past five decades.

Zavodny was a member of the team developing the first fully autonomous unmanned airplane.

Q: Most recently, you’ve been sharing your expertise of sensor technology as the chief scientist and chief technologist with

Northrop Grumman for an impressive endeavor called the HALE Global Hawk platform.

A: Over the past 18-plus years, it has been my pleasure to work on a unique set of platforms whose role is to provide imagery from very high altitude unmanned aircraft over all parts of the world. The aircraft does not have a pilot, it flies itself but can be controlled via mouse and keyboard from anywhere in the world. Its camera and radar images are instantly viewable from anywhere around the globe. Designing those sensors and providing that imagery has been my responsibility and has been tremendously rewarding professionally.

Q: Are there any fellow OSU-CEAT graduates at Northrop Grumman?

A: Yes, there are several, including at least two with whom I work, and many more I have not met. Trying to name them would be a disservice to those I have not yet met. Because of those OSU alumni and their contacts, one of our major suppliers is Frontier Electronic Systems in Stillwater.

Q: I hear that you have made contributions to the safety of the United States that we, as citizens, may never know. I’m beginning to think you are our very own superhero. Any chance I could talk you into an orange cape?

A: Just doing my job in trying to help protect our national servants who provide our daily security, at home and around the world.

“TED’S EXPERTISE IS IN THE SENSOR TECHNOLOGY FOR VARIOUS UNMANNED AIR VEHICLES. HE IS THE GENIUS TO SEE THE BIG PICTURE OF HOW ALL THESE UNMANNED PLATFORMS WILL WORK AND COOPERATE IN THE SAME AIRSPACE ENVIRONMENT. WITHOUT HIS LEADERSHIP AND VISION, THIS WOULD TAKE MANY MORE YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT AND NOT HAVE THE GLOBAL SUCCESS IT NOW ENJOYS.” — DARIUS KARALIS, CEO, JC-3 INC.

VAUGHN BERKHEISER VISITS WITH HIS GRANDSON AND CLASSMATE, HUNTER SUNTKEN, IN FRONT OF THE ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH CENTER.

VAUGHN BERKHEISER STUDIES WITH A GROUP DECADES YOUNGER AND FINDS HE’S LEARNING THE MATERIAL TWICE AS QUICKLY AS STUDYING SOLO. THOSE STUDYING ARE (FROM LEFT) BERKHEISER, MARLO ZOLLER AND CONNOR PARIS.