General Electric : How One Little Engine Launched A Career That Spanned The Jet Age

Dave Seiwert was fresh out of high school in 1956 when he got the opportunity of a lifetime. In his parents' garage, the 18-year-old built a 30-pound, 3-foot-long ramjet - a jet engine that uses forward motion to compress incoming air - and entered it into a local Youth Opportunity Day engineering competition. He won first place and with it an internship at GE's Jet Engine Department in Evendale, Ohio.

When engineers at GE heard about the ramjet, they urged him to bring it in for a test. It turns out his little jet could be capable of moving at 350 miles per hour, so fast that GE's Monogram magazine published a story about the intern and his marvelous machine. 'His tiny ramjet's big-time performance has convinced him: He'll be an aeronautical engineer - at General Electric,' the story stated.

The sentence presaged the next six decades of Seiwert's life. He joined GE Aviation and watched the jet age take off. You could say that Seiwert has seen it all. He started working on engines for America's early fighter jets and finished with the LEAP, an engine that includes 3D-printed parts and components from space-age ceramic composites. In between, he took a detour into space.

[Attachment]

Above: A pair of LEAP-1B engine powering Boeing next-generation 737 MAX jet. Image credit: Adam Senatori for GE Reports. Top: Dave Seiwert was 18 years old when he built a 30-pound, 3-foot-long ramjet in his parents garage. The engine led to a career at GE Aviation that span nearly the entire jet age. Image credit: Dave Seiwert.

Seiwert had always had his eye on the future. He got his engineering degree while working part time at GE, and used the company's test cells while writing his thesis on hypersonic flow - a theoretical physics problem studying shockwaves and how they affect jet engines. 'It was really surprising that they let me do that,' says Seiwert. 'Of course, there weren't that many lawyers back in those days!'

In 1962, Seiwert went to work full time at GE, where he used what he'd learned on that project to help design the thrust reverser for the engines that powered the huge airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft that the U.S. Air Force used to keep tabs on the Soviet Union's air activity.

While Seiwert was working on military planes, America's commercial air travel industry was taking off. Soon, as technology originally developed for military engines started entering civilian aviation, GE enlisted Seiwert to work on engines for commercial jets like the Boeing 747 and the McDonnell Douglass DC-10.

But he was far from finished. Tasked with helping to develop Ronald Reagan's infamous 'Star Wars' missile defense program in the '80s, his team came up with 'Turbo Machinery in Space,' a plan that coupled a nuclear-powered turbine with a laser to shoot down incoming missiles. The idea was to deploy 400 of these satellites into space. 'I had my doubts about having 400 nuclear reactors flying around in space, but we went ahead and worked on them for about three years,' Seiwert says.

Seiwert, now 78, continued to work on engine design for the Airbus A380 double-decker plane - the world's largest passenger jet, which GE designed in partnership with Pratt & Whitney - until he retired in 2002. However, his retirement didn't stick: 'I was out for about four months, then I started climbing the walls,' he says. 'I came back and worked on certification of the core engine design for the GP7200.'

He then went on to work on the LEAP engine, which was developed by CFM International - a 50-50 joint venture between GE and France's Safran Aircraft Engines. The LEAP is the best-selling engine in CFM's history with $200 billion in sales so far (U.S. list price).

Seiwert helped test the engine's ability to withstand crosswinds. Severe crosswinds during takeoff can distort an engine's fan and cause it to stall. At GE's testing ground in Peebles, Ohio, he put the LEAP engine through its paces to ensure that it could take off in high crosswind levels.

'It impressed me how far we've come since 1965,' says Seiwert. 'It's amazing how much better the engines are from a safety and reliability point of view.'

Finally, in 2015, he retired for good. 'You spend 59 and a half years in one place, you're going to have a lot of stories,' he laughs.