The story of the mobile flight simulator that Christopher Miller created to get school kids excited about math and science would make for the kind of buddy movie that never gets produced in Hollywood.
Miller was working on assignment for the Boeing Company at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in 2007. This is the U.S. Navy’s single largest piece of real estate, a chunk of California larger than the state of Rhode Island. A computer engineer based at Boeing’s large complex near the St. Louis airport, Miller liked the idea of a temporary assignment in California. It suggested a beach might be nearby.
In reality, China Lake is all beach and no ocean. It’s 1.1 million acres of the Mojave Desert. The nearest piece of sand that touches the ocean is in Santa Monica, 150 miles away. That’s a lot closer to the beach than St. Louis, but it eliminates the beach as a place to hang out after work – especially if you’re working on computers built into the world’s highest-precision fighter jets.
But there was down time at the remote test site. The Navy’s weapons testing site obeys the “hurry up and wait” ethos that dominates military culture. An engineer who works on fighter jets computers but always wanted to fly, Miller got the wild idea of building his own flight simulator. He started trying to piece one together in the living room of the house he rented at China Lake.
This is where the buddy movie plotline begins. Miller was renting a house in the desert with Keith Rogers, a Boeing test engineer who also was deployed at China Lake on DTA (Domestic Temporary Assignment). Rogers was the right guy for the job. He accumulates so much gear and circuitry that his work friends call him “Radio Shack,” after the electronics retail franchise. In between tests of the EA-18G Growler on the Navy’s weapons range, Miller and his buddy Radio Shack went – not to the beach – but to their living room, where they tried to figure out how to build a flight simulator.
When Miller returned home from DTA in the California desert, he brought with him the rudiments of the flight simulator they were trying to build. He knew that he was going to end up with a contraption bigger than a cockpit, and he knew that his fiancée at the time – now his wife, Jessica Miller – would not approve of his building a cockpit in the living room of his house in Webster Groves. “I knew she was not having it,” Miller said.
So he turned to Radio Shack. A bachelor without a fiancée at that time, Radio Shack made the living room of his house in Maryland Heights available for the project. As the contraption grew, and love also entered Radio Shack’s life, they moved their project to his garage. They had more things to do back home in St. Louis after work than tinker with the flight simulator, so it was more than five years after they began work in China Lake in 2007 before they were ready to get this thing out of the garage.
The next phase after the engineering was finished involved some heavy lifting in physical space. Miller wasn’t building a flight simulator just to have the world’s greatest personally owned video game in his buddy’s garage. Now he needed to build this thing out and get it on the road. He needed a flight simulator you could drive around to schools.
Miller had become a father since he started work on his brainchild. In 2011 he published a children’s book, under the author name Chris Ryan Miller, that he wrote for his daughter titled, “Daddy, How Do Planes Fly?” He dedicated the book to his father, Glenn Miller, who had been an operations manager at the St. Louis airport. His father worked at TWA during Chris’ earliest childhood.
Chris had been around and inside airplanes for as long as he could remember. But he knew that many children were not as worldly or as fortunate as him. A flight simulator, even more than his book, could really engage young minds with the wonders of flight and the possibilities of science.
So he called together the guys, some fellow engineers who ride bikes together, and they brought the tools of carpentry to bear upon Miller’s science experiment. His friend Steve Menendez offered to buy the lumber. “He showed up one Saturday with all the wood,” Miller said, “and we said, ‘Let’s just do it.’”
They did it. They built the flight simulator inside a trailer. When they were done, another friend, David Smith, an engineer turned accountant, paid to wrap the trailer with a graphic design and signage. “Take Flight to Your Dreams” was emblazoned across the trailer in letters as big as Miller’s head, with a small logo for Smith’s firm, Smith Patrick Financial Advisors. Then Miller hit the road to public schools to show kids what it feels like to fly a plane.
He pulls up to schools trailing some sophisticated equipment. Building this machine required deep expertise in aviation and engineering. “Chris works on some of the most advanced systems at Boeing,” said Randy Jackson, a communications specialist at Boeing who produced an in-house video about Miller’s mobile flight simulator. “It took him a long time to create something that delivers that experience for young people and teaches the fundamentals of flight.”
The fundamentals are, indeed, where the action is for Miller.
“I want to catch them early,” Miller said. “By high school, a lot of minds are made up. I really want to hit the elementary schools and capture them while they’re young with simple concepts.”
He means more than the fundamentals of flight, such as roll (rotation around the front-to-back axis), pitch (rotation around the side-to-side axis) and yaw (rotation around the vertical axis). He means the fundamentals of learning itself. Miller said, “I want to teach them, ‘You can do this.’”
‘Be the smart one’
Hollywood may not have arrived yet at this vision for a buddy movie, the young black computer engineer who gets a rainbow coalition of buddies to build a mobile flight simulator with him so he can open young minds to the wonders of science.
But it was, in fact, a movie about black men that made him want to fly: “The Tuskegee Airmen,” the 1995 HBO movie starring Laurence Fishburne and Cuba Gooding Jr. that had its origins in a manuscript by Captain Robert W. Williams, one of the original Airmen.
“I wanted to be a fighter pilot,” Williams said.
He went right to the source. After graduating from Hazelwood Central High School in 2001, he went to Tuskegee University, where the Airmen were educated. He decided to study the mechanics of flight, rather than how to be a pilot. It was no easy ride. He remembered that 30 students started with him in Aerospace Science Engineering 101; only six from the class would finally graduate with a degree in the subject.
His fantasies of being a fighter pilot also explain his gravitating towards Boeing. “They build fighter jets,” he said.
Inroads was the matchmaker. The St. Louis non-profit has the mission “to develop and place talented underserved youth in business and industry, and prepare them for corporate and community leadership.”
“Boeing typically hires interns after their junior year in college,” Miller said. “Inroads placed me there after my freshman year.” He went back to Boeing every summer during college to continue his internship and then was hired fresh out of Tuskegee. He has worked in weapons systems and on commercial platforms, and now specializes in computer systems aboard the F-15 Eagle, the U.S. Air Force’s primary fighter jet.
Asked for his elevator speech about what he does for Boeing, Miller said, “Airplanes have computers. Computers often need updates. I update their operating systems and add new capabilities.”
Miller does not talk about the F-15’s advanced infrared targeting and navigating system when he takes his flight simulator to places like Bermuda Elementary School in the Ferguson-Florissant School District. He does not explain its Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System that allows a pilot to aim sensors and weapons wherever he or she is looking. (Miller could not confirm what, if any, security clearance is required for his work at Boeing.)
The flight simulator is more of a motivational tool than an intro to aerospace engineering. “I tell them to ‘be yourself’ and not be afraid to be smart,” Miller said. “I tell them, ‘Sometimes you might be ridiculed for being smart, but you want to be that person. It will not hurt you. Be the smart one.’”
Miller designed and built his flight simulator on his own time and dime, with a little help from his friends. And like the other 600 Boeing employees in the St. Louis region who devoted about 4,000 hours last year to reach 17,000 area students (according to Matt Daniels, senior manager of education relations at Boeing), he trucks his flight simulator to schools on his own time as well. But he has the company’s wholehearted support.
“Chris is bringing math and engineering to life and bringing students hands-on experiences,” Daniels said.
Without question, volunteerism brings a halo effect to the defense contractor, which reported $96.1 billion in revenue in 2015. But the work that Miller and other Boeing volunteers are doing in local classrooms also contributes, ultimately, to the company’s bottom line.
“We are facing a shortage of engineers in the U.S.,” Daniels said. “We have almost 4 million people starting in kindergarten every year. We’re graduating just under 70,000 people from college with engineering degrees. In the aerospace industry alone, we need four times that number of jobs filled.”
Boeing has a workforce crisis looming much sooner than the elementary school kids of today can help to solve. Daniels said nearly 30 percent of the company’s workforce is eligible to retire today, and almost 50 percent is eligible to retire within the next five years.
“The numbers are not adding up,” Daniels said. “But, one by one, we are trying to impact students and get them interested in math and science and let them know that they can do this.”
Miller does not have to be told how crucial it is to hear this positive message at the beginning of your education. Asked to name teachers who had an impact on him, this man with a university degree in aerospace engineering praised teachers he had in kindergarten (Mrs. Pennington) and 4th grade (Ms. Whitaker).
“In fourth grade, I remember being encouraged to study math and science,” Miller said, “In kindergarten, I remember being encouraged in math – and to follow my dreams.”
For more information or to “schedule a flight,” visit http://chrisryanmiller.com/.
