New Embry-Riddle Program Teaches Fresh Thinking About Global Aviation

For years, aircraft collisions with seagulls that make their home in the beautiful Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge surrounding JFK Airport brought the risk of engine ingestion and crashes. Traditional methods to deal with the situation had been either shooting the birds or playing loud music to drive them away.

In 1996, JFK began to experiment with the use of trained falcons and hawks to scare the gulls away from flight paths. In the first season that these patrol birds were on duty at the airport, gull strikes fell by 66 percent.

"An innovative solution," says Peter Quigley, chairman of humanities and social sciences at Embry-Riddle in Prescott, Ariz. He's been watching these events at JFK closely ever since his department started a degree program in Science, Technology and Globalization that aims to teach students how to develop the same type of creative solutions for governments and corporations.

"The aviation and aerospace industries face an increasingly complex web of environmental, security, and technological concerns," he says. "We expect to educate the professionals who will manage this web."

"Industry and trade today know no borders," Quigley explains. "Students need to understand NAFTA and other global trade agreements. They need to know the importance of global environmental regulations to human health and wildlife protection. They need to understand the cultural influences operating in an ethnically and racially diverse work force and industry clientele."

The Science, Technology and Globalization program, the only one of its kind in the nation, offers three areas of specialization that are important to the aviation and aerospace industries: (1) security, (2) the environment, and (3) technology policy and management.

Students who specialize in security will have careers that include helping governments and companies deal with global problems such as airline terrorism, weapons proliferation, virus epidemics, and computer hacking. "They'll not only be able to analyze intelligence information, but understand the relationships between that information and the global dynamics that influenced it," says Richard Bloom, associate professor of clinical and political psychology and coordinator of terrorism, intelligence, and security studies in the program.

The environment track will train students to analyze the interaction between science and technology and the environment. They will mediate between corporations and governments on issues such as environmental regulations in the airline industry and environmental policies in global trade. "Every airport has environmental specialists who typically work to maintain legal compliances," Quigley says. "In the future, we'll see more leaders in these positions solving local and global problems in creative, environmentally sound ways."

The specialization in technology policy and management will prepare graduates who can serve as cultural "interpreters" of worldwide technological change. "They'll have the skills to work in the technological and human resource dimensions of global change, particularly in high-tech environments," says Juan Lucena, assistant professor of science and technology studies and director of the Science, Technology and Globalization program.

The program requires students to learn a foreign language and encourages them to study abroad and visit foreign airlines, airports, government agencies, research labs, and high-tech factories. Exchange programs are being developed with universities in other countries.

Students also serve internships with government agencies, policy organizations, and companies. Opportunities include cooperative work-study jobs at McDonnell Douglas; JFK International Airport; Terranext, an environmental engineering firm; Philip Environmental, a resource recovery and conversion company; and the Loka Institute, lobbyists for environmentally sound technology. During their co-op placement, students are to write a senior thesis that links their academic and real-world education.

The new program's faculty are committed to holding major conferences on global issues. Last April, Quigley organized a "Multicultural Forum on Aviation Communication," at which experts from around the world discussed how ethnicity, nationality, power, authority, gender, and nonstandard utterances and exchanges influence aviation communication. Bloom, Lucena, and Quigley are planning an international conference for early 1999 on "Science, Technology and Globalization: Agenda for the Next Millennium."

The Science, Technology and Globalization program is advised by John Bishop, director of major subcontracts for Boeing's Douglas Products Division; Thomas Casadevall, western region director for the U.S. Geological Survey and a volcanological consultant to the commercial aviation industry; John Dewane, former president of Honeywell's Space and Aviation Control Division; Donald Fleming, staff vice president of corporate reengineering at Trans World Airlines; Steven Garber, chief wildlife biologist at JFK International Airport; James Messerschmitt, former president of EDS Delphi Automotive Systems; and Richard Sclove, director of the Loka Institute's Technology and Democracy Project.

For information about the degree program, contact Lucena at (928) 777-3836 or lucenaj@pr.erau.edu.

The world's largest university specializing in aviation and aerospace, Embry-Riddle has campuses in Daytona Beach, Fla., and Prescott, Ariz., and more than 100 education centers in the United States and Europe. Its curriculum covers the operation, engineering, research, manufacturing, management, and marketing of modern aircraft and the systems that support them.