2019 TD&I Airfield Pavement Practitioner’s Award Presented to Tony Gerardi
Congratulations to Tony Gerardi, APR’s founder and President for being selected to receive the 2019 TD&I Airfield Pavement Practitioner’s Award. Tony was nominated by Mr. Frank Hermann. This nomination was further recommended by Dr. Michael McNerney and Mr. Scott Murrell of Applied Research Associates.
A Summary of Tony Gerardi’s Career and Development of Aircraft Simulation
For the Nomination of Tony Gerardi for the Airfield Pavement Practitioner Award
Written by Michael A. Gerardi
Sometime in the late 1960’s an Air Force General was flying out of Terrejon AFB in Spain. The general had a model ship sitting on the seat next to him. On takeoff, the KC-135 hit a bump, knocked the model ship off the seat causing it to break on the floor. The General declared that the runway was too rough and for it to be fixed. This unfortunate incident would ultimately lead a young engineer to develop a new technology to help predict the dynamic response of an aircraft to the pavement’s vertical profile. The young engineer was Tony Gerardi and the new technology was aircraft simulation.
There were two unique ingredients that combined to create this new technology. The first ingredient was his work environment. Tony had a good boss that provided him with the support and resources Tony needed to think about the problem, learn how to solve it and given the time to get the job completed. The other ingredient was Tony’s work ethic. Early in life, Tony developed a good work ethic and a determination to see a project through. With this determination and growing confidence obtained through incremental progress, he began to whittle away at the problem. Tony learned the computer language FORTRAN and used it to write the equations of motion necessary to model an F-4 Phantom. Before leaving work for the day, Tony would upload the program into the mainframe computer using punch-cards. Then, the next morning he would go to the computer room and see how far the simulation proceeded before it “broke”. This iterative process ultimately led to a computer program with a simple vibration model that could predict the aircraft’s response to measured profile data during a constant speed taxi operation.
Tony began to attend ASCE meetings and attending the TRB and other conferences as his career continued. This situation was unique in that he was an aerospace engineer among civil engineers. His objective was to grow his understanding of the pavement side and, in turn, help the civil engineers better understand the vehicles that used their pavements. Doing this help elevate the understanding of the interaction between the aircraft and the pavement.
As time progressed, the program’s capability was expanded to include more aircraft and Tony continued to enhance its sophistication to include takeoff and landing simulations as well. But, eventually, the USAF completed this project and relinquished it to the public domain. Tony would later team with Mr. Elson Spangler and provided the FAA with a version of the aircraft simulation capability. Tony would go on to alter the technology to run on a personal computer that was becoming more and more popular. His vision was to provide this technology to airports to identify and quantify pavement runway roughness. He felt that the existing technology was adequate to evaluate a pavement’s smoothness, but there was nothing available to evaluate for roughness. Tony’s ambition was to develop a better way to help airports evaluate their runways. Ultimately, this led to the development of APR Consultants, Inc.
In the early days of APR, Tony soon learned that to analyze runway roughness, the first thing you needed was good runway profile data, that was quick to measure. In 1993 and 94, Tony designed and built APR’s first Auto Rod and Level (AR&L) profiler. Using the principles of traditional surveying, Tony integrated a free-standing rotating laser coupled with a mast containing photo-voltaic receivers, a notebook computer mounted on a simple three-wheeled cart. Combined, these components were used to measure and collect true, rod and level quality elevation profile data measured at one-foot intervals. This unit could be pushed down the pavement at a comfortable walking pace collecting data as it went. This has been proven to be a significant improvement over traditional survey techniques.
Because aircraft simulation was a new technology there was much to discover regarding the interaction between the pavement and operating aircraft. For example, Tony began to learn of the safety implications of runway roughness during an aborted takeoff scenario. If an area of roughness is severe enough and encountered by the aircraft during a maximum effort to stop the aircraft, the aircraft’s response could result in the breaking of landing gear structural components. Another discovery that Tony made was that by measuring a runway’s true profile, changes to that profile can be observed, measured and tracked over time. Comparing the current, “as-is” profile data to an established baseline profile measured early in the pavement’s life began to show Tony how dynamic many runway pavements are.
Like others in this field, Tony is a hands-on engineer. Throughout his career with the US Air Force and later with APR, Tony took the opportunity to mentor younger engineers and to teach them what he learned throughout his unique experiences. Tony has worked with younger engineers teaching them about aircraft instrumentation, the development of vibration modeling and writing test plans that would be used to help validate these vibration models.
The innovations derived from Tony’s focus on developing a “better way” have made an impact on the airfield pavement industry. Since being a member of the ASCE’s Airfield Pavement Committee since the mid-1980’s, Tony was appointed the founding chair of the Ride Quality Task Committee which helped identify critical considerations for any future runway roughness criteria. He also led the development of the “Airfield Concrete Pavement Smoothness – A Handbook” sponsored by the Innovative Pavement Research Foundation (IPRF). Most recently, Tony organized a project consisting of APR, the FAA and CSRA with the mission to evaluate new profile measurement devices and compare their ability to replicate the California Profilograph and 12-foot straightedge for new pavement smoothness acceptance testing. This effort lead to changes that were recently adopted and published in FAA AC 150-5370-10H.
Mr. Gerardi has focused on a small, niche technology and followed through with additional development until its has become a widely used tool assisting the airfield pavement industry. Throughout endeavor this there have been setbacks and disappointments, but Tony continued. Through this experience, and because of his determination in developing this capability, I believe Tony Gerardi is a worthy candidate for the Airfield Pavement Practitioner Award.