The Complexity of E3 Engineering: A Conversation with EMA CTO Justin McKennon
Electromagnetic environmental effects (E3) engineering plays a critical role in protecting advanced technologies from electromagnetic threats. From lightning strikes to high-altitude nuclear events, E3 engineers work behind the scenes to ensure the resilience and reliability of complex systems in aerospace, defense, and other high-stakes industries.
To unpack the complexity of this critical field, we spoke with Justin McKennon, Chief Technology Officer at Electro Magnetic Applications, Inc. He shared what makes E3 engineering such a challenging discipline, and why training the next generation of E3 engineers is more urgent than ever.
Read the full interview below.
Lindsay Sax, Marketing Staff Specialist, EMA: Aircraft testing. E3. What makes being an E3 engineer difficult?
Justin McKennon: I think what makes being an E3 engineer hard is the breadth that is required to actually perform that work. Unlike a lot of the domains that you work in, so structures or fuels, you don’t really get the opportunity to specialize when it’s E3 because it touches so many different parts of the aircraft. You have to understand structures and the impacts of coatings and how fasteners are installed. And really the effects of those don’t become apparent till you put it all together.
So, we are very commonly put in high leverage situations that are key parts of the program and if we get something right or we get something wrong, it has material impacts on the program. So, we’re always kind of under fire when we’re doing that stuff.
Aircraft testing is kind of the final straw and a lot of the programs, frankly, I wish we did a lot earlier in programs, but you need to build it to be able to test it. That’s really where you characterize how the external environment gets inside. So, you have external RF environments from transmitters, high power transmitters and so forth. Lightning and other electromagnetic effects can cause all sorts of damage and equipment upsets. And by the time you run these tests, if you haven’t done simulation, you’re at a point where it’s really hard to fix it. And at EMA, “simulate what you can and test what you have to” is kind of the moniker that we use just to try to avoid those.
LS: In a certification campaign, tell me more about the role you and EMA play.
JM: E3 is a gap. They don’t make E3 engineers in college. It requires so many different skill sets to do it. And frankly, a lot of the E3 engineers we work with are at a huge disadvantage. We at EMA work on hundreds of programs every year, and we’re kind of the culmination of all the experience we get from all the lessons learned from those. And unfortunately, a lot of the customers we work with have awesome E3 engineers that have only worked a few programs, and so we’re able to come in and bring all of that expertise and the experience that we have working on these programs with us to help you make better design decisions so that you don’t have to wait until the end of your program to figure out what works, what doesn’t work, and have to start over.
LS: So, when it comes to certification tell me about the storytelling and human aspect of the process.
JM: A lot of my experience on both military and commercial programs means that you have human beings that are having to review and accept data. Did you or did you not show compliance?
As a DER (Designated Engineering Representative) I can sign off, and I have full authority so I can, you know, state that I approve this data there. But for new and novel designs, there’s a lot more oversight. And that’s really evident in the eVTOL industry right now. We’re learning how to certify those airplanes and if you just show a whole bunch of data to an administrator, to your FAA, to the Air Force, or any one of the military consultant programs there, it’s really tough for them to understand that you showed a green light and that means you pass. How did you get there? Did you follow good processes there? And I think the storytelling is something that we bring that’s really unique because we understand how it needs to be communicated, because we’ve done it so many times. And that storytelling shows rigor, it shows that you know what you’re doing. It shows that you didn’t cut corners, and that goes a long way with earning trust with the people that matter.
LS: Talk to me about how EMA is developing E3 engineers.
JM: We’ve embarked on probably the largest effort of training and staff growth, I think, as a company, in our almost 50 years of existence knowing we have to train the next set of experts in the industry. We’re not going to find them in many places. You know, we certainly try to find them as much as we can, but in reality, that comes from development. And we certainly are working our hardest to do that.
LS: Ideally, how would you envision the development process going?
JM: I think it’s really difficult to find what part of E3 you’re going to get into because there’s forms of test, there’s simulation, there’s everything from board level analysis all the way up to big giant physics problems like complex modeling. And we have specialized groups within EMA that are really good at all of those. I think we do a really good job of giving people an opportunity to try a whole bunch of things and feel really what their skillset will adapt to. But there’s a lot of really baseline traits that make you adaptable with it, a lot of scripting and data processing, and we spent a lot of time mentoring people on how to take kind of amorphous problems, I need to pass HIRF (high intensity radiation fields) on this airplane. And a lot of what we have to do from a mentoring standpoint is explain what does HIRF mean? Let’s build out your understanding of what the RF (radio frequency) environment is, what it does. Here are the ways. Here’s the standards that talk to you about how you can show compliance to that and then build up example workflows that we use internally here to work through problems that mimic the types of things we see on a day-to-day basis.
LS: What big projects are you currently working on?
JM: We have a lot of interest in adding PCI, or pulse current injection EMP capabilities in the coming years to better support our miliary programs that we work on. At the aircraft level we’re continuing to mature our HIRF and lightning aircraft test capabilities. That’s going to allow us to take more measurements in parallel and expedite our test campaigns, which obviously will save customers money and schedule time, which is really important to us.
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