It's the 40s. It's the middle of World War II. There's new types of technologies being fielded left and right from all sides that were involved in that conflict. And America needed to step up their game. And they had to do it quickly. Getting pulled into the war, 1941, 42, it was really important to

get ahead and get ahead quickly. And I think that the skunk works were part of America's answer to that,

getting out there and developing aircraft that, you know, had never been flown before,

platforms that had never been thought possible before, getting

that edge and keeping ahead of that edge, I mean, tied into that inherently is rapid prototyping.

Aircraft development begins with an idea, conceptual design sketches, and eventually physical models of

that idea.

But none of these are things you can actually fly.

Rapid prototyping is the phase of aircraft development where engineers take all those sketches

and models representing hours of conceptual thought and make them a reality.

Tom Kwasniak is a project engineer here at Skunkworks.

The majority of his day is spent solving engineering problems on the factory floor.

So I went to school for aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech.

Even growing up, I was basically interested in two things.

It was airplanes and race cars. You know, when I went to college, it was tough to kind of work on airplanes on the side, so I was on the Formula SAA team, which is an open wheel race team. You know, that was a lot more accessible to me than working on airplanes at the time. And that was really where I learned that I liked being on the manufacturing end of

things. You know, something about being out on the floor and working with the product directly,

that was where I wanted to spend all my time when I was on the formula team. You know, we had a little

design studio kind of upstairs in our shop. All the jigs and

equipment and machinery were downstairs, and I just always found myself downstairs as opposed to,

you know, up in the office working on CAD. And I guess that sort of continued on to, you know, my

professional career.

Most traditional design models follow a linear process of analysis, design, development, implementation, and finally evaluation.

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