It’s hard to get bored when your day job involves climbing into a seat on the upper deck of a Boeing 747 and cruising over the Sierra Nevada mountain range on a regular basis. For Nate Kamps, principal engineer and test director for GE Aerospace’s Flight Test Operations team in Victorville, California, the work — and the view — never gets old.
The history of GE and modern aviation are closely linked. Few symbols embody the connection more than the original GE flying testbed, a 49-year-old Boeing 747-100 that served as an airborne lab for engineers testing generations of new jet engines. The plane, the last operating model of the first variant of the iconic 747 jet, made its final flight earlier this month.