COMMUNITY CONVERSATIONS: Region’s legacy of innovation endures because of the Air Force

You can watch a recording of the Community Conversation on the Dayton Daily News Facebook page or our website.

Editor’s Note: The transcript below was edited for brevity and clarity.

What did the evolution of the modern Air Force look like and what role Dayton and our region have in shaping it?

ZEIS: The evolution of the modern Air Force is all fundamentally grounded in Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Wilbur and Orville Wright used Huffman Prairie to learn and refine their aircraft, specifically Wright Flyer III, but they came back later for the Wright Brothers School of Flying. It’s where the modern Air Force was birthed and where those aircraft programs have been managed since. And it remains the center of gravity of aeronautical research in the United States. You look at Air Force Materiel Command here, arguably the largest aviation holding company in the world, everything from basic research to applied research and development, acquisition, fielding, flight test, all the way to logistics, sustainment — it’s all managed here.

It seems like many contractors aren’t having trouble attracting the employees they need. Is that a strength of our area?

GRALEY: There’s just a density of expertise here. You have great universities. You have a lot of people with PhDs and advanced scientific and engineering degrees moving to Dayton as the constant turnover of active duty personnel. So there’s always talent in this region and there’s always fresh talent. I think it’s lost on a lot of people that things like hypersonics happen here. Things like advanced sensors, GPS. I don’t think that talent pool is ever going to dilute as a result of the infrastructure that the Air Force has put in place to continue to invent, discover and innovate.

ZEIS: When BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) happened in 2005, we had to aggressively try to attract folks from Mesa, Arizona and from San Antonio, Texas. And what really sold the region was the technological expertise, but also the quality of life, the cost of living, arts and education. It was the cultural pieces that really sold it. Typically, you get 5-10% of government employees moving after a Base Realignment and Closure to the new location. In this case, it was north of 40%. And that was staggering. I think when we did the math that saved the US government, the taxpayer, seven millennium of experience. It was all rooted in the the attraction of the Dayton region.

BARLOW: From the perspective of why military tend to stay here at Dayton, we did a study at SOCHE a few years ago and surveyed thousands of veterans about what they were looking for. When you’re getting ready to settle somewhere, the top few items on the list were availability of jobs, quality of schools and availability of healthcare. And then amenities.

Something I think that is really unique about what our region does and many others don’t is our Hometown Heroes program. Talk about a way to make someone feel welcome. I have personal examples of military members who had their first trip to a major league baseball game or their first trip to a Broadway show through the Hometown Heroes program. I get goosebumps just talking about that. That’s our community.

What’s on the horizon for how local higher-ed organizations interact with the base?

BARLOW: One of SOCHE’s biggest initiatives is called Workforce We Need. We work really closely across Wright-Patterson on understanding what their needs are from a workforce perspective and then make sure that students are aware of those opportunities. We have a lot of federal positions in our area. We are very lucky in Ohio. Obviously we have Wright-Patt, but we also have a defense finance and accounting service with the Defense Logistics Agency. We have the DEA, we have the FBI and I could go on and on about the great federal agencies to work with.

Another area we work really closely with the base on is research. We sponsor master’s and PhD-level students who are working on Air Force-related research. And we do that in cooperation with the Department of Higher Ed, with the goal of building a high-tech workforce here in Ohio.

Another area that we work on continually is curriculum development. Universities partnering with industry teammates, with employers, as well as with the Air Force Base on courses about digital transformation and creating digital natives. We’re going all the way down to down to the K-12 schools and helping them with their education around what is it that we need you to know coming out of school so that you’re prepared to jump directly into the workforce.

What do you see as possible threats to missions at the base? What can the Dayton community or Ohio do to address them?

BEGLEY: Even though we’re not expecting the base to close, we cannot sit back and just expect everything to continue to grow without any work or effort by our companies, our communities. Wright-Patt generated $17 billion in economic impact for our region. Even a small portion of that going away can have a huge ripple effect to our contractor base as well. Not just our economy, but the people working those jobs. And I think the recent standup of the National Space Intelligence Center is really good example of this. This was a result of a lot of advocacy that has been done by the community and others closely connected to it for years to try and make sure that that mission was stood up here and not somewhere else. That advocacy, that support and also making sure we have the talent here to supply that support really helps to protect all of these and make sure that we can continue to grow and support these missions.

What are some of the base’s lesser-known contributions?

BARLOW: We could talk about the thousands of patents that come out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base every year, but we know about those and it’s fantastic that our scientists and engineers are contributing so much to general scientific knowledge. I want to talk about something that is right there in front of us but we might not notice: The majority of our individuals who work on base, live off base. They are part of our community every single day. And sometimes we don’t know that the master sergeant that works at the National Aerospace Intelligence Center is coaching our kid’s baseball or mentoring someone through Big Brothers and Big Sisters.

I want to mention something else not a lot of people know about, which is the Air Force Educational Outreach Office. It was started back in 1998 by two engineers who wanted to spark more kids to go into STEM fields. And programs like FIRST LEGO League and the Wizards of Wright and Starbase and science fair judges have gotten into our schools in the region. And since 1998, they’ve served 500,000 students here in in our region. They’ve volunteered $27 million worth of educational programming in our region. I know there are kids that were sparked by that and are now studying STEM as a result of one of those programs.

What are some technologies that came from the base’s research that now shape our world today?

GRALEY: I was fortunate to be a human performance person at AFRL. And we had the Fitz Lab. Paul Fitz helped invent aerospace physiology, right? So things like G-suits and helmets, testing what can a human can endure in air and at what speeds, how do we augment you and make it able to push that envelope even further, etc. It was critical and foundational to people being able to achieve the things we’ve done with all the aircraft we’ve designed and built.

ZEIS: They first generated liquid oxygen breathing systems for aircraft in 1928 and started to set altitude and speed records in Dayton, Ohio. The development of the modern parachute. You think about stealth aircraft, of low observable technology. You think about all of the manufacturing technologies, 3D printing, advanced materials, advanced alloys, exiting out of the Air Force Research Laboratory materials or manufacturing directly. The human performance, the sensors, we use all those kinds of sensors that are built now. GPS. It’s incredible where those where those come from, and when you look to the future, it’s shaped not just by aerospace, but by everyday applications.

BEGLEY: We’ve talked about all these exciting things from history, but it’s still happening in Dayton. As a community trying to support some of these newer missions and keeping an eye on what’s going on, that includes advanced air mobility that’s being rolled out of the Air Force Research Labs and then also digital transformation. The DDC and all of our partners are working with those in academia, industry and government to ensure that Dayton and the state supports these missions so that all of these contributions continue.