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Hector Del Aguila is an expert in EMI, Lightning Protection and HIRF, and also serves as a DER (designated engineering representative) for the FAA. In this episode of the Struck Podcast, he shares wisdom from his career as a researcher, his time with Eclipse Aircraft, and how his work on military aircraft helped shape his private sector work in the aviation industry. Hector is also an EME specialist, providing consulting services to numerous government contractors and organizations. Hector is the president of Golden Aero Consulting and we are very grateful to have him on the show. Watch the YouTube video version of this podcast episode here: https://youtu.be/30kqC-6uwtg Learn more about Weather Guard StrikeTape segmented lightning diverter strips. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit us on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Show Transcript - Struck Podcast EP8 with Hector Del Aguila, FAA DER And as part of that education, your focus, and at the time you weren't, were you thinking about being, we're working in the aircraft industry or were you just electromagnetics and you just like the math? I always have a desire to, to work in our space and, and I think we're on an aircraft. And, for personal reasons because of, my mother died on the, blank crush, when I was, seven or eight years old and, and soil was thought about, when I became, when I was studying engineering. That's something that the, that it peaked my interest. And I decided to move, to do research on things to do, to protect, Not on the aircraft, but then like electrical and electronic systems in general and your stuff, like you're originally from Korea. Yeah. I was wondering through, yeah, you say it better than I do. It's such an awesome, yeah. I came here, you know, in my early twenties and yeah. And, at the study and then that's it. So after, after you had your, you guys' degree in Texas, you went, where was your next step? Where did you go? Oh, yeah. Well, after I got the degree at Texas, while I was working on my graduate, degree, I taught in the university. I thought about the metrics and, and I engineered laboratories about that point a couple of years. Well, I'll say a graduate assistant. And they, after that, I moved to Albuquerque to a, an organization called LaFollette. That's the air force operational test and evaluation center, as an RF engineer. Not familiar with that place. What did they do? What do they call that place at that organization? in New Mexico, they do operational testing of, of systems, and, aerospace systems and these stairs, in, in that particular time, it was some satellites and telecommunication systems is what I thought. And ? No. Well, what kind of airplanes were you working on at the time? Well, I thought at that time he was, at that time was not airplanes at the time. It was mostly, telecommunication systems. gotcha. Satellites, satellite, things like that. For example, there was a, there was a system called middle star. I'll try service. So after about three years of being on the operational world, I realized that that's not really what my main interest was. So, because I wanted to do some reasons to do research, and after three years, I moved from to. so the air force research laboratory worked there for about 20 years doing research, again, looking at protection of electrical systems, things like that from, from the electromagnetic standpoint. So, as, as, I mean, doing research over a 20 year span has gotta be pretty incredible to see. A lot of the technology change, just I'm sure the, the resources you had, you know, in just the systems and you, and you could test and I'll just like the different, you know, the technology and, and software I'm sure use it. How did, how did research change for you over such a long period of time? Well, it, it was, it was very nice because we were able to,