IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2007 - 15

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Hispanic Employee Program, or HEP,
Martínez has played an active role in bolstering the Latino presence within the
LaRC and NASA as a whole. "I'd love to
attract more Hispanics, but my goal is to
encourage girls' interest in pursuing a
science or technology career with NASA.
The more girls I can encourage in science
and engineering, the better."

Winging It
For 15 years, Martínez worked on flight
simulation technology projects as part of
LaRC's simulation development and
analysis branch. As a simulation systems
engineer, Martínez assisted projects such
as the high speed civil transport, a supersonic passenger jet developed as part of
NASA's high-speed research program.
She also was involved in the blended
wing body project, which looked at radical changes in plane-body design to
increase fuel efficiency by reducing drag
and maximizing lift. "These are advanced
aircraft concepts that may not necessarily be feasible given the state of technology at the time," said Martínez, "but what
they learned is still applicable to any
high-speed aircraft."
Many of the flight simulation projects
with which Martínez has been involved
attempt to combat issues of flying in
inclement weather or poor visibility conditions since "weather is a major safety
concern in aviation," she says. She
helped test synthetic vision systems, or
SynVis, in single-engine, fixed landing
gear Cessna planes. Even in pitch-black
conditions or severe weather, the technology offers the pilot a three dimensional picture of the environment. "So
when you couldn't normally see out the
window, you still can see the terrain and
land the aircraft," said Martínez.
After working for a time as a simulation systems engineer, Martínez decided
to actually get into the cockpit of a real
plane and earn her wings. "I went to my
boss and said, 'I'm flying these things in
the simulator, and I'm pretty good at it.
But it would be kind of cool if I knew how

Page 15

to fly for real," she says. "What do you
think of sending me to flight school?"
Her supervisor agreed and paid for
Martínez to put in her hours of stick time
at Langley Aero Club to earn her private
pilot's license. The experience was invaluable, she says. "When the researchers
would come to run their models, I would
have already test flown the simulation
and we could focus on the details of their
study." Her simulation and real-world
flight experience allowed her to serve as a
flight operations engineer in other flight
research projects as well.

many young Latina girls looking for a
motivated and positive role model. But,
she qualifies, "You have to give yourself
some leeway to change that direction to
increase your options."
Martínez was featured in a children's
book geared toward Latina girls called,
Ay, Mija! Why Do You Want to Be an
Engineer? by Edna Campos Gravenhorst.
Of the ten engineers Gravenhorst wrote
about, three were NASA women. When
Martínez signed copies of the book at the
planetarium at the University of Texas at
Arlington, "classrooms of children came

Martínez is not
just a master of
flight sims. She's
also earned her
private pilot's
license.

PHOTO COURTESY OF NASA AND SANDY GIBBS

01mwie01-keller.qxd

At the time she was earning her
pilot's degree, Martínez was also six
months pregnant with her first of three
children, Alexander. Like his mom,
Alexander loves airplanes. "I tell him that
must be because he was bouncing all
over the runway before he was born," she
says. Though Martínez says she doesn't
pressure her children to follow in her
footsteps, she does want them to dream
big and tries to expose them to educational events to encourage their interest.
"You gotta have a goal. Without a goal,
you can't tell what you are aiming for,"
she tells her kids, just as she tells the

WINTER 2007/2008

out to see us in person and that was
cool," she says. "They got to see real Latina engineers and ask us questions."
She also says that maintaining the
Web sites for Latina Women of NASA,
LWON, and HEP@NASA LaRC is key.
"The LWON site provides profiles about
Hispanic women working at NASA that
was never there when I was growing up,"
she says. "Any young girl, could look at
this Web site and say 'Hey, her background is similar to mine-maybe I
could accomplish that too'."
-Julia C. Keller is a freelance science writer living in Boston.

IEEE WOMEN IN ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2007