Chapter 20 Linda Gooden 2006 Black Engineer of the Year FIRST
THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE, WRITTEN BY ROGER WITHERSPOON, WAS PUBLISHED IN US BLACK ENGINEER & IT, CONFERENCE ISSUE
2006. In 2005, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) needed a hand in a hurry. There were more than 600,000 general aviation pilots crisscrossing the skies to thousands of commercial and private landing fields across North America, and monitoring them in increasingly crowded skies was difficult. Pilots filed flight plans through 58 FAA call centers, which in turn provided weather data and other information, but these centers had limited capabilities and difficulty coordinating with each other. The FAA knew the system needed to be replaced. Enter Linda Gooden, the founding president of Lockheed Martin Information Technology. She believed the FAA needed a fully integrated network of 20 centers, each carrying a redundant capability so that any one system could moniter a flight from origin to destination anywhere in the nation. The flight plans are automated, and if someone doesn’t close out a flight plan—signaling that the plane arrived at its destination—the system alerts the nearest agencies. It was not surprising that the FAA awarded Gooden’s group the $1.9-billion contract. Under her leadership, Lockheed’s IT division has become the world’s leader in government information technology systems, with 14,000 employees in 70 domestic sites and 18 foreign countries, and more than $2.2 billion in revenues. What is surprising is that this company did not exist until 1994, when Gooden and four colleagues developed a business plan for a new venture within Lockheed.
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