# Geoffrey H. Karli

> Flight Test Engineer at Boeing (CH-47 Chinook and MH-139 Grey Wolf). 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.

- Website: https://geoffreykarli.duckdns.org/
- Email: geoffreykarli@outlook.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoffrey-karli/

## Career

### Boeing: Flight Test Engineer, CH-47 Chinook and MH-139 Grey Wolf (Aug 2025 – present)
- 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.

**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.

### Piasecki Aircraft Corp.: Rotorcraft Instrumentation and Test Engineer (May 2024 – Aug 2025)
- 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.

### Penn State, AERTS lab: Graduate and undergraduate research assistant (Aug 2021 – May 2024, State College, PA)
- 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).

### Bell Textron: V-280 Rotor Systems Design Intern (May – Aug 2022, Fort Worth, TX)
- Rotor systems design work in CATIA 3DX and ANSYS Mechanical, with GD&T.
- Helped the team transition to model-based design (MBD).

## Research projects

### [Full-scale eVTOL rotor icing](https://geoffreykarli.duckdns.org/projects/full-scale-evtol-icing/)
Aug 2022 – May 2024. Research assistant, M.S. thesis. Rail Tec Arsenal icing wind tunnel, Vienna, Austria. Sponsor: FAA.

Electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) fly lower, slower and with smaller rotors than conventional helicopters, and there was little experimental data on how their rotors behave in icing. The FAA funded this project to collect that data at full scale.

I designed the tilt-table rotor stand through modelling and analysis, built the data acquisition system, and took it to an icing wind tunnel in Vienna for the test campaign. The data now serves as validation cases for eVTOL icing models and as supplementary information for the FAA in writing eVTOL icing rules.

- Designed, fabricated and tested a rotor test stand capable of spinning full-scale eVTOL blades, with a tilt table for hover and cruise conditions.
- Developed the data acquisition software and installed the hardware and supporting circuitry.
- Ran a two-week experimental campaign in the Rail Tec Arsenal icing wind tunnel in Vienna.
- Processed the performance and ice-accretion data for use as validation cases for eVTOL icing models and as input to FAA eVTOL icing regulations.
- Publication: G. Karli, S. Yan, J. Palacios, "Full-scale eVTOL rotor icing wind tunnel testing," 80th Vertical Flight Society Annual Forum, 2024.
- Publication: S. Yan, G. Karli, J. Palacios, J. Nangle, "Development of icing experiment techniques for eVTOL UAM certification," AIAA SciTech Forum, 2024.

### [Small eVTOL rotor icing detection](https://geoffreykarli.duckdns.org/projects/small-evtol-icing/)
2021 – 2022. Undergraduate researcher. AERTS icing facility, Penn State.

Small electric rotorcraft don't have the room or power budget for traditional ice-detection hardware. This campaign asked whether the motor controller, which already measures torque, could tell you when the blades are icing.

We ran a representative eVTOL rotor in the AERTS icing facility across a range of cloud conditions and built the relationship between torque rise and liquid water content that a detection program could use.

- Collected electronic speed controller (ESC) torque data and compared it against independently measured torque.
- Related rotor torque to the liquid water content (LWC) of the icing cloud.
- Developed a method for quantifying and detecting blade icing from on-board torque data.
- Presented the work at the 78th Vertical Flight Society Forum in Fort Worth (eVTOL II session).
- Publication: G. Karli, S. Yan, R. McKillip, J. Palacios, "Drag performance degradation due to icing of eVTOL," 78th Vertical Flight Society Annual Forum, 2022.

### [UAV rotor acoustics](https://geoffreykarli.duckdns.org/projects/uav-acoustics/)
2021 – 2022. Undergraduate researcher. CATS anechoic chamber, Penn State.

How much quieter (or louder) do drone rotors get when you stack them, offset them or change the blade count? This campaign measured thrust and noise across a wide set of configurations so the trade-offs could be compared directly.

Each configuration got an RPM sweep in the CATS anechoic chamber, with a microphone array recording the acoustics and load cells under each rotor measuring thrust.

- Ran RPM sweeps on 18–20 in drone rotors, measuring both acoustics and performance.
- Compared coaxial and offset layouts and the azimuth phasing between rotors.
- Tested 2-, 3- and 6-blade hubs, different hub types and five blade designs.
- Rotors sat on thermal shrouds with load cells, with a microphone array around the stand.

### [Turbofan blade icing](https://geoffreykarli.duckdns.org/projects/fan-blade-icing/)
2021. Undergraduate researcher. AERTS icing facility, Penn State. Sponsor: Industry (GE).

A company-sponsored campaign to collect icing data on a representative jet-engine fan blade. The aim was to understand how ice forms, how it sheds and how much performance is lost under different icing conditions.

We tested two blade shapes in both rime ice (colder, around −16 °C) and glaze ice (warmer, around −6 °C).

- Captured ice-shedding events with high-speed video.
- Measured ice shapes and accreted ice density, and digitised photos of ice shapes to find impingement limits.
- Collected performance degradation data on two different blade shapes.
- Varied liquid water content, droplet size, RPM, nozzle location and temperature, and mapped the chamber's temperature profile.
- Used a new passive balancer system up to 1400 RPM.

### [NASA Dragonfly rotor testing](https://geoffreykarli.duckdns.org/projects/dragonfly/)
2021. Undergraduate researcher. Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Dragonfly is NASA's rotorcraft lander mission to Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Penn State was brought in to design the blades.

My advisor, the M.S. student on the project and I drove down to APL to test on the half-scale stand. When the others were pulled into meetings during our test window, I ran the full test series the APL researchers had planned.

- Penn State designed the rotor blades for Dragonfly in collaboration with Johns Hopkins APL.
- At APL I ran the scheduled test series on the half-scale stand myself: stand and sensor setup, motor control, and keeping the stand healthy.
- Performed a frequency-response test on the stand using a shaker to find its harmonic frequencies.

### Rotor aerodynamic and acoustic scaling
Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence, Aug 2021 – May 2024. 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.

## Publications

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

## Education

- M.S. Aerospace Engineering, Penn State, 2022 – 2024. GPA 3.93. Advisor: Dr. Jose Palacios.
- B.S. Aerospace Engineering, Penn State, 2019 – 2022. GPA 3.85.

## Awards

- Frank N. Piasecki Scholarship, Vertical Flight Society (2022): For undergraduate contributions to vertical flight engineering.
- Sigma Gamma Tau, aerospace engineering honor society (2021 – 22): Top 25% of the aerospace class; class rank 21.
- Tau Beta Pi, engineering honor society (2021 – 22): Top 20% of senior engineering students at Penn State.
- Class of 1922 Memorial Scholarship (2021): For undergraduate academic accomplishment.
- Penn State Club of Georgia Scholarship (2020 – 21): For academic achievement among Penn State students from Georgia.

## 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

## Background

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.

## Outside of work

- MetaLock: 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: A TrueNAS server running my self-hosted apps, monitoring with alerts, and this website. (TrueNAS, Docker, Grafana)
- AI-assisted video editing: 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: A manager that hands tasks to AI coding agents, reviews their work independently and reports to my phone. (Python, Git)