I’m not super familiar with this industry. I did work for NASA for a few years in the 80’s. A couple of places to try:
– Morton Thiocol (of the Space Shuttle O-Ring fame). They are located outside of Salt Lake City, a few miles from the middle of no where.
– Boeing. In Seattle. They do both commerical and military aviation. In this particular company I’d say do your research. There are a lot of people there who wanted to design airplanes who are actually responsible for very minute, specialized, parts of the aircraft and never do anything else. The engineers are also union.
– Aerojet. In Sacramento, CA. They’re really a chemical company, but they designed the rocket fuels for many missiles.
– Lockheed. Don’t know where they’re located, particularly the division that does aircraft. I think they’re the lead company on the Joint Strike Fighter and Boeing is assisting. There was a great Nova (the PBS program) on the competition between Boeing and Lockheed for the design of the Joint Strike Fighter.
Defense jobs can be very cyclical depending on the contracts, gov’t spending, etc. OTHO, they probably won’t be outsourcing them to China anytime soon. In general, it’s really a bad time to be an engineer.
