GRADUATE ALUMNI/AE Advised by Robert F. Stengel

Reunions Party, May 29, 1999

Reunions Party, June 1, 2004

Reunions Party, June 1, 2006

Some remarks made at the 2006 reunion:

Your average class year is 1989, with a standard deviation of 7. Therefore, you are a bona fide old timer if you graduated before 1982 or a youngster if after 1996. In any event, I still think of all of you as being between 22 and 28.

I was blessed when each of you decided to attend graduate school at Princeton. We had a magical experience together, as we taught each other things that neither of us knew before. As a consequence, we told the world things that it didn't know about:

• digital flight control
• control systems that used fiber-optics and voice recognition
• control systems that tolerated nonlinearity, failure, and uncertainty
• mitigating the flight hazards of windshear and wind rotors
• identifying the aerodynamic properties of airplanes by flying the planes, collecting, and analyzing data
• incorporating artificial intelligence, optimization, and neural networks in adaptive control systems
• and designing faster impact computer printers

We flew aircraft at Princeton's Flight Research Laboratory until 1983. When we began, most flight simulations and control systems used analog electronics, the high-speed digital line between the hangar and the computer center operated at 300 baud, and PCs, word processors, spreadsheets, PDAs, cellphones, the WorldWide Web, CDs and iPods (even the Walkman) had yet to arrive in force. Still, most of you were spared the need to use slide rules or green semilogarithmic graph paper -- but your cursive script handwriting degraded over time.

In the mean time, you have followed your stars, becoming entrepreneurs, test pilots, engineers, analysts, innovators, professors, and inventors. You and your spouses (spice?) have raised families, sent children off to college, and even become grandparents. What a joy it has been to watch your lives unfold. My namesake, baseball manager Casey Stengel, is reputed to have said, "Ability is getting credit for all the home runs that somebody else hits." He also said, "Now there's three things that can happen in a ball game: You can win, you can lose, or it can rain."

Thank you for hitting a lot of home runs, for fending off the rain, and for providing all of us with a winning season.

Ph.D. Degree Recipients

• Aharon Bar-Gill, Longitudinal Flying Qualities Criteria for Single-Pilot Instrument Flight Operations, 1982

• Muthathamby Sri Jayantha, Data Acquisition and Aerodynamic Coefficient Estimation at High Angles of Attack, 1983

• Prakash C. Shrivastava, Stability Regions of Relaxed Static Stability Aircraft Under Control Saturation Constraints, 1986

• Mark L. Psiaki, Control of Flight Through Microburst Wind Shear Using Deterministic Trajectory Optimization, 1987

• Stephen H. Lane, Theory and Development of Adaptive Flight Control Systems Using Nonlinear Inverse Dynamics, 1988

• David A. Handelman, A Rule-Based Paradigm for Intelligent Adaptive Flight Control, 1989

• Chien Y. Huang, A Methodology for Knowledge-Based Restructurable Control to Accommodate System Failures, 1989

• Laura Ryan Ray, Stochastic Robustness of Linear Multivariable Control Systems: Towards Comprehensive Robustness Analysis, 1990

• D. Alexander Stratton, Aircraft Guidance for Wind Shear Avoidance: Decision Making Under Uncertainty, 1992

• Sandeep S. Mulgund, Longitudinal Aircraft Flight in Wind Shear: Deterministic Trajectory Optimization and Feedback Control Using Nonlinear Inverse Dynamics, 1994

• Dennis J. Linse, System Identification for Adaptive Nonlinear Flight Control Using Neural Networks, 1994

• Christopher I. Marrison, The Analysis and Design of Control Laws for Uncertain Systems Using Stochastic Robustness Metrics, 1994

• Axel Niehaus, Optimal Rule-Based Guidance for Autonomous Vehicles, 1995

• Kristina Richardson, Identification of Aerodynamic Coefficients with a Neural Network, 1999

• Sai Manohar Gopisetty, Failure Detection and Identification: Application to Aircraft Control, 2000

• Qian Wang, Stochastic Robust Control of Nonlinear Systems, 2001

• Silvia Ferrari, Algebraic and Adaptive Learning in Neural Control System, 2002

• John P. Wangermann, Principled Negotiation and Distributed Optimization for Advanced Air Traffic Management, 2003

• Nilesh Kulkarni, Predictive and Reinforcement Learning for Magneto-Hydrodynamic Control of Hypersonic Flows, 2006 (co-advised with Professor Minh Phan, Dartmouth College)

M.S.E. Degree Recipients

• W. Brian Binnie, Direct Side Force Control - A Flight Investigation of Handling Qualities During Terminal Area Operations, 1978

• Jean M. Fernand, Determination of the Stability and Control Derivatives for the Variable-Response Research Aircraft using a Modified Maximum Likelihood Estimator, 1978

• Richard Lucal, Pilot-Vehicle Interactions as Predicted by an Optimal Control Model, 1979

• James C. Seat, A Flight Investigation of Digital Control using Microprocessor Technology, 1979

• James M. Steinberger, In-Flight Simulation of the General Aviation Aircraft Stall, 1979

• David Atzhorn, Digital Command Augmentation for Lateral-Directional Aircraft Dynamics, 1981

• Gregory D. Hanson, Command and Stability Augmentation Techniques for Aircraft with Control Saturation, 1981

• Ralph A. Nichols, Implementation and Evaluation of an OMEGA-Dead Reckoning Hybrid Navigation System, 1981

• John A. Foxgrover, Design and Flight Test of a Digital Flight Control System for General Aviation Aircraft, 1982

• Claude Fratter, Determination of the Aerodynamic Coefficients for the Avionics Research Aircraft using the Estimation-Before-Modeling Technique, 1982

• Scott L. Grunwald, Command Augmentation Incorporating Direct Side Force Control and Microprocessor Technology, 1982

• Francois Dallery, Failure Detection and Identification for a Reconfigurable Flight Control System, 1983

• William A. Ehrenstrom, A Lateral-Directional Controller for High-Angle-of-Attack Flight, 1983

• Michael E. Murphy, In-Flight Longitudinal Handling Qualities Investigation for Complex Flight Control Systems, 1984

• Xavier Silhouette, Estimation of the Aerodynamic Coefficients and Derivatives of the Navion Aircraft at High Angles of Attack and Sideslip, 1986

• Gary C. Hsieh, Experimental Study of the Aerodynamics of a Rectangular Wing in Steady-State Spin, 1986

• Kristin Farry, Distributed Processing and Fiber Optic Communications in Air Data Measurement, 1988

• David B. Glade, In-Flight Investigation of Longitudinal Flying Qualities Criteria, 1988

• Robert M. Taylor, Identification of Printer Hammer Dynamics using the Estimation-Before-Modeling Technique, 1988

• Brenda L. Belkin, Cooperative Rule-Based Systems for Aircraft Navigation and Control, 1989 (recipient of the 1990 William E. Jackson Award, Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics)

• Parvadha Suntharalingam, Applications of Computer-Aided Control System Design to Linear Quadratic Model-Following, 1989

• Daniel Swanson, State Estimation for a Tethered Satellite System Using the Extended Kalman Filter Algorithm, 1991

• Darin Spilman, Dynamic Response and Control of a Jet Transport Aircraft to a Single-Axis Wind Vortex, 1993

• Laura Iwan, Design of a CMAC Neural Network Controller for the Preferential Oxidation Reactor in a Fuel Cell Vehicle's On-Board Methanol Fuel Processor, 1997

• Olivier Laplace, Coordinated Flight of Uninhabited Air Vehicles, 2001