Aerospace Initiative Home Page

I've created this page to familiarize people with the work the committee on industry collaboration of the Aerospace Industry Initiative of the Governor's Workforce Investment Board in Maryland did in 2006 and 2007 under my leadership.

I attended the Aerospace Summit held by GWIB in January 2006. I heard about this meeting via the Baltimore section of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The meeting was interesting. By tossing my business card in a jar I received as a reward Tom Friedman's book "The World Is Flat." While interesting, the book had many flaws.

Later in 2006 I received a message about a followup meeting to be held in June 2006. I went to that meeting and sat in on the industry collaboration committee. To the best of my knowledge, I had never met any of these people before. The same can be said of the larger Aerospace Initiative meeting. Our discussion was interesting and thoughtful. At the end of the meeting Art Taguding, the Maryland government representative, said we needed a chair to continue leading the group in its work. Everyone looked at me. Art asked if I was surprised. Since I had observed how the meeting went, I replied I was not at all surprised. If, however, you had told me at breakfast that morning that I would be leading a group to bring together Maryland aerospace companies to work on common challenges, I would have raised an eyebrow.

I got the group off to a good start -- according to others -- by writing a Statement of Purpose. Don McErlean did some light editing. Our group began having monthly meetings -- sometimes more frequently -- to discuss progress in creating a strawman proposal for an organization tentatively named the Maryland Aerospace Association. Here are the minutes of some of our meetings:

* September 12, 2006
* October 23, 2006
* November 21, 2006
* December 5, 2006
* January 7, 2007

Our meetings petered out after this. Northrop Grumman VP Bob Noble seemed to blow hot and cold on our committee's work. I do not know what other people were saying to him. I did get an occasional e-mail from him about our committee's work. Later, without any discussion with me about what he did not like, he dropped support for our committee's work completely. Later on he proposed a Governor's Advisory Council on Aerospace to be made up of the state's aerospace CEOs. This idea was a complete nonstarter. One wonders what thinking was going on.

Our group did develop a variety of documents in support of our strawman proposal. They are:

* A Vision Statement
* A Charter
* Organization Chart
* Organization Chart Descriptions

E-mail me at charles dot j dot divine at gmail dot com if you have half a mind to.