Kassi Luja
kassiluja.md@gmail.com
She and her husband were being followed.
That’s exactly what Chris Wright, wife of Cal Poly aerospace engineering lecturer Bruce Wright, thought when she and her husband traveled to Europe for the first time in 1986.
“We were on the (London) subway — the tube — and I noticed this man standing in the corner,” Chris said. “He kept looking at us. I teased Bruce and said, ‘We’re being watched.'”
Just days after the encounter, the pair was some 281 miles away exploring Paris when Chris turned the corner and saw the same man standing there.
“It was the same (guy),” she said. “He had the same trench coat on.”
While Bruce Wright didn’t know it at the time, he now believes the man in the trench coat “was somebody from the U.S. security organizations” who was checking to see if Wright really went where he said he was going, according to the itinerary he is required to turn in whenever he travels.
That’s the type of job Wright had before becoming a small town college professor.
A coal miner’s son
Wright was born and raised in Blacksburg, Va. — a coal mining town at the time. While his father was a coal miner, Wright had no intention of following in his footsteps, he said.
“I stayed as far away from (coal mining) as I possibly could,” he said.
When he arrived at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) in 1958 for his first day of college, the school assumed he wanted to study agriculture since he lived on a farm.
Instead, Wright said he wanted to be an engineer. After being given a list of the various kinds of engineers, aerospace was No. 1 on this list. Wright told the school he wanted to “be one of those.”
He had never so much as been up close to an airplane, touched one or even ridden in one.
Top-secret
Wright graduated from Virginia Tech in 1962, and soon began work at Lockheed Martin (then Lockheed Corporation) in 1965. Up until he left the company in 1999, much of his work had to be kept secret from his wife, Chris said.
“He was in a top-secret role at Lockheed,” Chris said. “Any time we traveled personally, he would have to provide the company with our itinerary and they would tell him where we could or could not go.”
Other than filing itineraries, Wright was also required to be away from his wife for long periods of time.
“I used to call him ‘008’ (rather than 007) because I used to have to call (an) 800-number when he was traveling,” Chris said. “He could never tell me where he was going — which took a lot of trust (on my part).”
These 800-numbers were only to be used in case of emergency and if and when Chris would call, the person on the other line would relay the message to Wright.
Later, Wright would have a lasting impact on the United States’ war on terrorism.
He led a team of aerospace engineers to design an unmanned aerial vehicle, which on the night of May 2, 2011 was hovering above Abbottabad, Pakistan as a team of Navy SEALS covertly entered a private residential compound thought to house Osama bin Laden.
As the team completed its mission to kill Bin Laden, Wright’s aerial vehicle televised the entire ordeal back to the White House in real time.
This was one of five “black rocks” — or secret programs — Wright designed. Wright now has four designs that have yet to be revealed to the public.
“They’re honest-to-God black rocks that would fit in my hand,” he said. “Two of them are painted black, and two of them are kind of gray to indicate the level of secrecy the programs were, or are.”
Along with working on unmanned aerial vehicles, Wright has also worked on 31 other airplanes including Dark Star — an unmanned aircraft for which he has a patent.
“There aren’t many people in the world who get to work on 32 airplanes like I did,” Wright said. “Most people work on one or two airplanes their whole life, which I consider to be pretty boring.”
Wright said his favorite moment of his career thus far was getting Lockheed Martin back in the fighter business.
“Now, Lockheed totally dominates the fighter world,” he said. “We will soon be the only builders of fighter aircraft in the U.S.”
The man behind the planes
The tall, white-haired aerospace engineer worked at Lockheed Martin for 35 years before retiring in 1999. He didn’t start teaching at Cal Poly until September 2008, but even now he continues to have contact with the organization he devoted almost four decades of his life to.
Wright travels to Lockheed Martin once a year with his classes, but when there, he is not allowed to ask about certain programs or whether or not certain airplanes are flying or in production.
When a worker leaves Lockheed Martin with security clearances, they are debriefed and told to forget everything they’ve ever known about those airplanes, he said.
“They can’t answer because I no longer have a need to know,” Wright said. “That’s the key to the really top-secret programs. If you don’t have a need to know to do your job, then you can’t find out. So I can’t even ask them. I have to wait to find out the same time the general public finds out.”
Though he is no longer working at Lockheed Martin, Wright co-teaches an airplane design class with associate professor Rob McDonald.
“I really like teaching with him,” McDonald said of Wright. “I think our strengths and weaknesses are very complimentary.”
While McDonald teaches a lot of the core, technical aspects, Wright said he teaches students how it all fits together to design an airplane.
“That’s what I bring to the table with 50 years of experience,” Wright said.
When Wright isn’t in a classroom, he spends his summers researching his family genealogy, and has even discovered a connection to the famous pioneers of flight, the Wright brothers.
Along with genealogy, Wright also enjoys reading spy novels, gardening, traveling and looking after his two Yorkiepoos (half Yorkshire Terrier, half toy poodle), Jack and Jill.
Though Wright’s life is more run-of-the-mill these days, his love for aerospace is still evident.
“If you work for the right company, it is extremely fun and fulfilling,” he said.