Photo By Jill Pickett | Kevin Muckerheide, center, the new vice director of Arnold Engineering Development...... read more read more
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. – Kevin Muckerheide was looking for a way to pay for college.
Air Force recruiters presented an intriguing offer.
“The Air Force came along and said, ‘Hey, we’ll get you hooked up with an ROTC scholarship if you study engineering,’” Muckerheide recalled. “I thought, ‘Great! I’ll get my college paid for, put in four years, get out and get a regular job.’”
But Muckerheide soon discovered he had found his calling with the Air Force. Now, in a career spanning more than 30 years, he is ready to begin the latest chapter of his Air Force story.
Muckerheide is the new Arnold Engineering Development Complex vice director. He began officially serving in this capacity on March 28 from his office at Arnold Air Force Base, headquarters of AEDC.
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Muckerheide grew up in rural Indiana. He earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana, and would later earn his master’s in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado in Denver, Colorado. He is also a graduate of Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California.
Muckerheide brings to AEDC 26 years of active-duty service, several years of support contractor employment and nearly four years of Air Force civil service work.
Commissioned in 1989 as a distinguished graduate of the ROTC program at Rose-Hulman, Muckerheide’s first assignment was with the National Air Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. Several assignments in the intelligence community followed. From there, Muckerheide completed several flight test assignments at Edwards AFB, including graduating from Test Pilot School and serving in the F-22 Combined Test Force.
After a stint at Headquarters Air Force at the Pentagon, Muckerheide was assigned to command a test detachment at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. This was followed by a pair of assignments in the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB. Between these assignments, he deployed to Iraq. He went on to serve as a director of engineering at Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts, and concluded his active duty as commander of an Air Force Test Center group at Edwards AFB.
Muckerheide then served as an engineering subject matter expert at Wright-Patterson AFB and was the liaison between the AFTC engineering directorate and program offices, labs and command headquarters at Wright-Patterson.
Most recently, Muckerheide served as technical director for the Air, Space and Cyberspace Operations Directorate, an organization within Headquarters Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson. His job entailed providing technical guidance, suggestions and recommendations to the general officer in charge, and ensuring necessary infrastructure and resources were available to accomplish the test mission.
His responsibilities as AEDC vice director will be similar. Muckerheide said AEDC plays a critical role in test, as its facilities allow for the detection of shortfalls near the beginning of the development process and before items are fielded, helping to protect equipment, capital and warfighters.
“AEDC’s role in that, you start to test things after metal is bent,” he said. “We start to have an item that is testable, but it’s not the full-up system yet. It’s important to have an understanding of what’s going on with that hardware while it’s still early in the development process where it’s relatively inexpensive for the contractor and the program office to make changes, to recognize, ‘Here’s a deficiency. We weren’t sure if the design was going to work out that way or not.’ Either it does or it doesn’t and, if it doesn’t, we can still make changes.”
Muckerheide added he will act as AEDC Commander Col. Randel Gordon’s “right hand man,” lending his support to help ensure Gordon and AEDC, as a whole, continue to be successful.
“Whatever he needs me to focus on, I’m there for him,” Muckerheide said. “If he is out TDY [temporary duty assignment], I can step in. The whole expectation is that everything continues running seamlessly whether he’s here or not. He’s got good confidence that he’s got a good team here to backfill and make sure things are running as they need to be run.”
Muckerheide said he tends not to set goals upon starting a new job. Instead, he prefers to observe organizational operations for a while to get a feel for the methods used to accomplish tasks. He plans on taking this same approach at Arnold, offering feedback when he sees fit.
“My job as the new guy coming in is to kind of recognize those things but not necessarily do anything about them initially, because you might find after two or three months of being there that there’s a very good reason why things are done differently at location A as opposed to the rest of the world or location B as opposed to the rest of the world,” he said. “It’s not until you’re there for a couple or three months before, most of the time, you start to realize, ‘Ah, there was a reason. That makes good sense now.’”
Still, Muckerheide took the time to learn as much about AEDC as he could prior to starting. This included touring the facilities of the Aerospace Survivability & Safety Office, an AEDC unit at Wright-Patterson AFB, and speaking with former AEDC personnel now at Headquarters AFMC, including previous AEDC commanders Gen. Scott Cain and Arthur “Art” Huber.
This helped forge Muckerheide’s expectations of Arnold AFB before he set foot on the base for the first time.
“Everyone that I mentioned [it to] that I was going to have this opportunity, they were just jealous beyond belief,” he said. “The engineers all said, ‘Oh my gosh. It’s an engineer’s playground down there. You’ve got to dig in, and you’ll just love being down there.’
“Ever since I found out in December I was coming here, I’ve been looking forward to this.”
AEDC vice director is a rotational position, meaning Muckerheide will serve in the capacity for a few years before another individual is selected as his successor. Muckerheide said, thanks to his prior experience, he is quite comfortable with this and intends to make the most of his time at Arnold AFB.
“I was very surprised when I came into the Air Force,” he said. “I had no expectations of enjoying the constant moving that the active-duty life brought upon me. It completely caught me by surprise. It was really a joy to get stationed in different parts of the country and experience the cultures, experience the climates, see what the people are like, see what kinds of festivals they celebrate throughout the year because, until you live there, you don’t really enjoy that. You can go visit for a week or so, but it’s just not the same.
“Tennessee is one of those places that the Air Force never sent me to, and everybody spoke very highly of the place, so when this opportunity came up, I thought, ‘Wow, what a chance!’ I get to right a wrong. I get to go see what I hadn’t gotten to see yet, so I’m very much looking forward to getting to do that.”
| Date Taken: | 04.17.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 04.17.2023 09:55 |
| Story ID: | 442722 |
| Location: | ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, TENNESSEE, US |
| Web Views: | 31 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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