Geoffrey Karli
Geoffrey sitting on top of a full-scale eVTOL rotor stand inside an icing wind tunnel

Geoffrey H. Karli

Flight Test Engineer at BoeingCH-47 Chinook and MH-139 Grey Wolf

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Full-scale eVTOL rotor icing test, Vienna

I plan, instrument and run rotorcraft flight tests. Before Boeing I built instrumentation for an experimental tandem-rotor aircraft at Piasecki, and before that I spent five years at Penn State testing rotors in icing tunnels and anechoic chambers.

Now
Flight test engineer at Boeing, CH-47 and MH-139
Flight test
50+ hours as test conductor, including in flight
Education
B.S. and M.S. Aerospace Engineering, Penn State
Published
4 papers at VFS Forum and AIAA SciTech

Career

From rotor test stands in university labs to flight test on production helicopters.

  1. Aug 2025 – present

    Boeing

    Flight Test Engineer, CH-47 Chinook and MH-139 Grey Wolf

    • Experimental rotorcraft flight testing across the whole program: planning, instrumentation, test execution and reporting.
    • Test conductor on active rotorcraft test campaigns, with over 50 hours of on-aircraft test conduct, including in flight.
    • Coordinate across multidisciplinary teams to keep test programs running.
    Geoffrey in a blue Boeing flight suit with his name tag and an American flag patch, against a blue sky
    Boeing flight test

    Safety comes first

    Flight test exists to find out what an aircraft does before anyone else has to, which means the test team carries the risk first. I take that seriously. Every test point is planned, reviewed and briefed before the aircraft leaves the ground, with clear limits and a clear plan for what happens when something is outside them.

    As a test conductor I am responsible for keeping the test on the card. That means watching the data in real time, keeping the whole team informed, and calling a stop the moment something does not look right. A test point can always be flown again tomorrow; nothing on the schedule is worth compromising the crew or the aircraft.

    Good flight test is disciplined, not heroic. It depends on honest briefings and debriefs, a culture where anyone can speak up, and lessons that are written down and carried into the next flight.

  2. May 2024 – Aug 2025

    Piasecki Aircraft Corp.

    Rotorcraft Instrumentation and Test Engineer

    • Designed flight-critical components, test fixtures, test procedures and DAQ instrumentation for an experimental tandem-rotor vehicle.
    • Installed strain gauges and the flight DAQ system, and built the LabVIEW monitoring program for health monitoring and safety.
    • Wrote MATLAB and Python tools for vibration analysis and data reduction.
    • Part of the vehicle build, pre-flight rotor ground testing and airframe vibration and modal testing.
  3. Aug 2021 – May 2024 State College, PA

    Penn State, AERTS lab

    Graduate and undergraduate research assistant

    • M.S. thesis: an FAA-funded full-scale eVTOL rotor icing test stand, tested in Vienna.
    • Rotor scaling for the Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence: SLA-printed sub-scale blades, compressed-air tunnel testing and PIV wake imaging.
    • Lab manager and undergraduate mentor. Teaching assistant for junior-level aerospace structures (2022).

    See the research projects

  4. May – Aug 2022 Fort Worth, TX

    Bell Textron

    V-280 Rotor Systems Design Intern

    • Rotor systems design work in CATIA 3DX and ANSYS Mechanical, with GD&T.
    • Helped the team transition to model-based design (MBD).
    Geoffrey with fellow interns in front of the Bell sign
    Bell interns, summer 2022
    Geoffrey standing next to the Bell 360 Invictus mock-up
    With the Bell 360 Invictus mock-up
    Geoffrey sitting in the Bell 360 Invictus cockpit mock-up
    In the Invictus cockpit

Research projects

Five years in Penn State's AERTS lab, almost all of it experimental. Each project has its own page with photos and video.

Geoffrey on top of the full-scale eVTOL rotor stand inside the icing wind tunnel
Aug 2022 – May 2024

Full-scale eVTOL rotor icing

My M.S. thesis. A tilt-table rotor stand that spins full-scale eVTOL blades inside an icing wind tunnel.

 Small rotor test stand covered in ice inside the AERTS icing chamber
2021 – 2022

Small eVTOL rotor icing detection

Detecting rotor icing from motor-controller torque data alone. Presented at VFS Forum 78.

 Coaxial six-blade drone rotors on the test stand inside the anechoic chamber
2021 – 2022

UAV rotor acoustics

Noise and thrust of coaxial and offset drone rotors, measured in an anechoic chamber.

 Gloved hand holding a fan blade with a thick layer of ice on the leading edge
2021

Turbofan blade icing

An industry icing campaign on jet-engine fan blades, with high-speed video of ice shedding.

 Dragonfly half-scale rotor test stand in the APL test cell
2021

NASA Dragonfly rotor testing

Running the half-scale test stand for the octocopter bound for Saturn's moon Titan.
Aug 2021 – May 2024

Rotor aerodynamic and acoustic scaling

Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence

Testing the same rotor at 10 cm, 22 in and 10 ft scale to validate rotor scaling in a new compressed-air wind tunnel. I modified full-scale blades for SLA printing, designed the mid-scale 6-blade rotor and hub, collected sub-scale performance data and imaged the wake with PIV.

Raised in a hangar

I was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Georgia, in a house where the garage never held a car. My father was a pilot who built airplanes as a hobby, so there was always a fuselage in there instead. I took my first biplane ride when I was three.

Growing up around airplanes, and being good at math and science, made aerospace engineering the obvious choice. I went back to Pennsylvania for Penn State, then on to Bell, Piasecki and now Boeing, where I test the same Chinook I once stood in front of at an airshow.

Geoffrey as a child with his father and brother in a blue Bücker Jungmann biplane
My father, me and my brother in his Bücker Jungmann
Blue biplane on a grass field
The Jungmann on the grass
Airplane fuselage parked in a home garage
The garage, with a fuselage where a car should be
Geoffrey in a workshop next to a WWI-style triplane under construction
A triplane in the workshop
Young Geoffrey in front of a CH-47 Chinook at an airshow
In front of a Chinook at an airshow, years before testing them
Young Geoffrey in front of a Saturn V rocket exhibit
Under a Saturn V

Recognition

Geoffrey holding his scholarship certificate at VFS Forum 78
Frank N. Piasecki Scholarship, VFS Forum 78
Vertical Flight Foundation scholarship recipients on stage at Forum 78
Vertical Flight Foundation scholars, 2022
Geoffrey next to the Nittany Lion shrine at Penn State
Penn State
  • 2022
    Frank N. Piasecki Scholarship, Vertical Flight SocietyFor undergraduate contributions to vertical flight engineering.
  • 2021 – 22
    Sigma Gamma Tau, aerospace engineering honor societyTop 25% of the aerospace class; class rank 21.
  • 2021 – 22
    Tau Beta Pi, engineering honor societyTop 20% of senior engineering students at Penn State.
  • 2021
    Class of 1922 Memorial ScholarshipFor undergraduate academic accomplishment.
  • 2020 – 21
    Penn State Club of Georgia ScholarshipFor academic achievement among Penn State students from Georgia.

Publications

  1. Full-scale eVTOL rotor icing wind tunnel testing G. Karli, S. Yan, J. Palacios 80th Vertical Flight Society Annual Forum, 2024
  2. Characterizing rotor performance changes with scale in compressed air M. Miller, G. Karli, E. Greenwood, J. Palacios 80th Vertical Flight Society Annual Forum, 2024
  3. Development of icing experiment techniques for eVTOL UAM certification S. Yan, G. Karli, J. Palacios, J. Nangle AIAA SciTech Forum, 2024
  4. Drag performance degradation due to icing of eVTOL G. Karli, S. Yan, R. McKillip, J. Palacios 78th Vertical Flight Society Annual Forum, 2022

Education

  • M.S. Aerospace EngineeringPenn State, 2022 – 2024GPA 3.93. Advisor: Dr. Jose Palacios.
  • B.S. Aerospace EngineeringPenn State, 2019 – 2022GPA 3.85.

Tools and skills

Test and measurement

Flight test planning and conduct, DAQ and instrumentation, Strain gauges, Vibration and modal testing, PIV, Icing and wind tunnel testing

Analysis and design

MATLAB, Python, LabVIEW, SolidWorks, CATIA 3DX, ANSYS Mechanical, Abaqus, FEM / FEA, FFT, GD&T

Software and infrastructure

TypeScript / Next.js, Docker, Linux, TrueNAS, AI agent workflows, LaTeX

Outside of work

I build software, automation and self-hosted infrastructure, mostly with AI coding agents.

MetaLock

In development

Hand-curated build tier lists and guides for the game Deadlock, with a custom editorial workflow for drafting, reviewing and publishing.

Next.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL

Home server

Running

A TrueNAS server running my self-hosted apps, monitoring with alerts, and this website.

TrueNAS, Docker, Grafana

AI-assisted video editing

In development

A DaVinci Resolve pipeline where an AI agent proposes edits and learns my style from explicit feedback.

DaVinci Resolve, Python, AI agents

Coding-agent orchestrator

Design

A manager that hands tasks to AI coding agents, reviews their work independently and reports to my phone.

Python, Git

Portrait of Geoffrey Karli

Get in touch

Happy to talk about flight test, rotorcraft, test instrumentation or anything on this page.

geoffreykarli@outlook.com LinkedIn

© 2026 Geoffrey H. Karli. Self-hosted.