Johnny Stevens ’64 and John Tomblin work in different professions. Stevens is a commercial real estate developer. Tomblin is executive director of the National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University.
Their educational backgrounds differ. Stevens is a WSU accounting graduate. Tomblin holds three degrees from West Virginia University, one in aerospace and two in mechanical engineering, including a doctorate. Stevens, an All-American Shocker golfer and former pro, takes to the greens every chance he gets, while Tomblin, who enjoys a game of golf when he can, also likes to kick back and watch a movie. As different as they are, though, a couple of years ago, these two Shockers got together and envisioned a most expansive answer to, as it turned out, an entire complex of seemingly unrelated questions, the key ones being: What should be done with the mothballed Kansas Coliseum? Where can we find the space needed to expand NIAR?
The answer Stevens and Tomblin came up with was a topic of conversation last June at the Paris Air Show, the world’s largest aerospace show, which this year attracted 2,215 exhibitors including Beechcraft, Bombardier Aerospace and Spirit AeroSystems. “It was held just outside Paris at the Le Bourget Airport, or however you say that airport’s name – my French accent isn’t so good,” says Tomblin with a laugh. “But they were talking about what we’re doing right here in Wichita – right here,” and he nods at Stevens and glances up and around the vast interior of NIAR’s newest facility, the Aircraft Structural Test and Evaluation Center, ASTEC for short.
Right here on the former floor of the Kansas Coliseum’s 12,000-seat Britt Brown Arena, where the now-defunct Wichita Wings indoor soccer team once made its home, where Garth Brooks and KISS sold out shows and the Wichita State Shocker basketball teams played the 2002-03 season while the Roundhouse was undergoing its major renovation to become Charles Koch Arena.
Right here on the main test floor of ASTEC, the center that is helping position Wichita State and NIAR as the largest aerospace research complex in the United States. Right here smack dab in the middle of the largest university-based structural aircraft-testing lab in the world.
The World’s Largest
It was Stevens who came up with a viable plan for having the old Britt Brown Arena in the Kansas Coliseum reconfigured into ASTEC, a facility with a clearance height of 48 feet and clear span of more than 240 feet that allows testing and research on unmanned aerial vehicles, business jets, commercial aircraft as large as a Boeing 787 and military aircraft the size of the Air Force B1-B bomber.
“Without Johnny Stevens,” Tomblin says, “we wouldn’t be here.”
Built in 1977, the arena, which was owned by Sedgwick County, was the site of concerts, sporting events, monster truck rallies and rodeos for more than 30 years, before officials determined that a larger downtown arena in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act should be built.
After Wichita’s INTRUST Bank Arena opened in 2010, the coliseum’s arena was shuttered and sat vacant and in disrepair for two years – roughly the same time that Tomblin was looking for ways to increase the size and thus the research capacity of NIAR’s labs. “I even had blueprints drawn up,” he says, adding that the estimated construction costs were fatally prohibitive to that plan.
“Successful real estate developers can look at a piece of property and imagine its future,” says James Rhatigan, WSU emeritus dean of student affairs and current development consultant for the WSU Foundation. “Uniquely gifted ones – like Johnny Stevens – are able to discern many futures. Often between the idea and the reality is the personal commitment of millions of dollars, a leap of faith without a safety net.”
Faced with estimated costs of between $2.5 million and $4 million to raze the vacant Britt Brown Arena, Sedgwick County closed a $1.5 million sale with Stevens for the complex in January 2012. The sale included the Britt Brown Arena and four Kansas Pavilions. Stevens would continue operation of the pavilions and had set plans in motion to remodel the arena into the aircraft test facility that Tomblin had in mind.
“Johnny Stevens found a solution to a real problem,” says Mike Pompeo, U.S. Representative for Kansas’ 4th congressional district, which includes Sedgwick County. “It was a good solution for the county, and a good solution for Wichita State’s NIAR. Johnny is a consummate developer. He takes real risks, but weighs them against potential benefits to create value.”
No newcomer to commercial real estate development, Stevens partnered with another WSU graduate, Steve Clark ’65, on the Waterfront in east Wichita, among other projects. Notwithstanding his experience and expertise, Stevens says making the multifaceted deal for the 150-acre coliseum site, including a 10-year lease agreement with NIAR, followed by the conversion of the arena into ASTEC, stands among his most difficult.
“It’s one of the most unusual things we’ve done. We’re proud of it,” Stevens says. “Scott Hall (minority partner in the project and owner of the Wichita-based Hall Industrial Services) did the interior demolition work. An unusual deal with the arena was that it had concrete seating, and that had to be dealt with.”
After renovation work, including a new roof in addition to the concrete-seating removal, the former arena now boasts 100,000 square feet of laboratory space and 30,000 square feet of office space on two levels with client observation and work areas and a 30-by-70-foot hangar door on the south end. “We more than doubled the amount of full-scale structural testing space that existed before and greatly expanded the ability to test larger aircraft,” Tomblin says.
“We expanded,” Tim Hickey ’85 understates, then smiles. Hickey, a WSU math grad and former manager of ground testing at Hawker Beechcraft, has been director of NIAR’s full-scale structural test lab since 2004. Before the expansion, the lab was housed in two buildings, totaling 49,000 square feet, on Beechcraft’s main campus in Wichita.
Hickey, who now offices at ASTEC, says he was enticed to join NIAR’s staff nearly a decade ago by Tomblin. “John is forward-thinking,” he says. “For one thing, he saw early on that lots of aircraft companies were downsizing their own test facilities and knew that NIAR could help fill that niche. He was right.”
Up, Up and Away
Since its creation in 1985, NIAR has soldered a reputation for itself as a world-class resource for developing and testing leading-edge aviation technology. It has gained elevation from savvy piloting by each of its executive directors: its first, the late John Breazele, William Wentz ’55/61 (1988-96), Ramesh Agarwal (1996-2001) and Tomblin, who was named to NIAR’s top position in 2003 when he was only 33.
Originally envisioned to serve industry, government and education by a group comprising aviation industry representatives, the late Warren Armstrong, WSU president from 1983-93, and the late Fred Sudermann ’58/60, former WSU vice president for research, government and industrial relations, NIAR has taken off to become the largest university aviation R&D institute in the United States – credited with saving the aerospace industry hundreds of millions of dollars in research costs.
“NIAR,” says WSU President John Bardo, “is widely recognized both in state and nationally as one of the most important centers for research that directly affects American industries’ competitiveness.”
The institute holds two FAA Center of Excellence designations, one for general aviation research, the other for composites and advanced materials. In addition, NASA sponsors the National Center for Advanced Materials Performance, located within NIAR, and the National Science Foundation named WSU/NIAR as a Center for Friction Stir Processing. These designations are more than an honor. They mean nuts-and-bolts projects that lead to new knowledge, economic growth and jobs in R&D and on the manufacturing floors of both established companies and entrepreneurial ventures founded on spin-off applications.
“The best part of my job,” says Hickey, whose duties as ASTEC director vary from bidding and contract paperwork to conducting client design reviews to overseeing the site’s general operations, “is knowing there’s always something challenging to work on. There’s always another project coming down the line, another new model to test.”
Now operating more than 450,000 square feet of laboratory and office space and employing 400, NIAR has a client list that includes Boeing, Bombardier Learjet, Cessna, Beechcraft and Spirit Aerosystems – companies with executives and engineers who say NIAR has saved them millions of dollars in testing and travel money by developing and operating labs in Wichita.
It is, of course, an expensive undertaking to equip, staff and maintain even one state-of-the-art lab; NIAR has 18. Out of necessity, it has developed an invaluable cog of research and funding partnerships with the aviation industry, government agencies and the state of Kansas.
Show and Tell
From the main floor of ASTEC, where technicians come and go attending to ongoing testing of the Learjet 85, the company’s first business jet to feature a composite structure, Tomblin ushers Stevens and the other members of the small tour group into an enclosed lab space tucked into the southeast corner of the building. He is eager to show off the lab’s unique denizen – a 500-kip load frame capable of performing both axial and torsion testing on materials up to eight feet in length.
It was Tomblin, who, with the help of a number of others, including Congressman Pompeo, saved the machine from the junkyard by acquiring and repurposing it for NIAR. “It came from a retired lab at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City,” Tomblin says. “There was another one made, but we have the only one of its kind in use today.”
Pompeo, whom Tomblin describes as a friend to NIAR and to aviation in general, says, “When it comes to making a difference for his vision for NIAR, John is incredibly aggressive, articulate and innovative in making the case for what NIAR and this new facility need to continue to be successful. The aviation manufacturing cluster in Wichita is the largest in the United States, and NIAR is a central contributor to the industry.”
Tomblin, a Bloomfield Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering who in March of this year also was appointed interim vice president for research and technology transfer, arrived at Wichita State in 1994 as an assistant professor of aerospace engineering.
Since taking over the top spot at NIAR, he has grown the institute’s nonprofit budget from $18.2 million in 2002 to $46 million in fiscal year 2013. His specialty is working with composites and other advanced materials. Another specialty of his – grounded, perhaps, on his understanding of composites – is in assembling collaborative networks of people and organizations, despite the recent economic downturn and years of sluggish recovery.
“An innovative scholar engaged in prototype development may be slowed or defeated by a lack of resources,” Rhatigan points out. “Finding those resources requires an entrepreneurial spirit, the ability to develop and demonstrate behaviors well beyond scholarly comfort zones. Success, in rare instances, may produce spectacular results, propelling one into worldwide leadership.”
And, as was the case in October, into the spotlight and onto the itinerary for members of the Kansas House and Senate budget committees making a bus tour of state colleges, universities and technical schools. In June, Kansas lawmakers cut $33 million for higher education from this year’s budget and $32.8 million from next year’s.
On Oct. 23, they spent the day at Wichita State and toured ASTEC,
where presentations and discussion emphasized the university’s longstanding cooperation with and research support for local industry, as well as plans for its future. Aircraft engineering executives were on hand to talk about Wichita State’s longstanding contributions in conducting contract research work and graduating students who are workforce ready. A director of engineering at Bombardier Learjet, for instance, called WSU his “pipeline” for hiring engineers.
Tomblin told the visiting lawmakers that WSU ranks No. 3 in the nation for spending on aviation research and No. 1 for non-governmental aviation. And President Bardo spoke of his plans for Wichita State to become the center for technology and innovation for south-central Kansas, and beyond.
“The future,” he said, “is in entrepreneurship and innovation.”
Fore!
Opened in 1990, the 74,000 square-foot, three-story building that headquarters NIAR activity anchors the southeast section of WSU’s campus. With a bit of imagination, the grand sweep of its front façade can be seen to mimic the windflow over an aircraft undergoing aerodynamics testing in the Walter H. Beech Wind Tunnel. Visitors and staff exiting the building’s main entrance look out onto Wichita State’s 18-hole golf course.
In the not too distant future, that view will change, if Bardo’s plans for a business and technology park on campus take material shape. Since becoming WSU’s 13th president on July 1, 2012, Bardo has often discussed Wichita’s being part of an economic super-region running along I-35 from south-central Texas to Kansas City. To take full advantage of this opportune location along the I-35 Corridor, he is working – like Tomblin within NIAR – to expand the university’s ongoing efforts in engineering, technology transfer, business innovation and public-private partnerships. In early November, Bardo explained that to make room for the tech park, which includes plans for two engineering buildings to be constructed east of NIAR, WSU’s Braeburn Golf Course would be reduced from 18 holes to nine.
The golf course is what was part of the old Crestview Country Club, which WSU acquired when Crestview moved to new quarters back in 1969. Stevens, a WSU golf star from 1960-64, was then a young family man, a CPA and in his second year on the professional golf tour, playing his way to some $11,500 in winnings. It was also the year he retired from the PGA tour to become managing professional of the WSU golf course.
He recalls, “I wanted to spend more time with my wife and family here in Wichita. I had two kids then and one on the way.”
Stevens comes from a golfing family, one filled with Shockers, starting with his parents, Nick and Annie Stevens, who attended the university in the 1930s, and continuing through two more generations to a fourth-generation Shocker, his granddaughter Abby Stevens, now a sophomore at WSU, where she plays not golf, but tennis.
During his own college-athlete days, Stevens won the Missouri Valley Conference twice, the state amateur title twice and was twice recognized with NCAA All-America honors. He became a charter inductee of the Pizza Hut Shocker Sports Hall of Fame in 1979. In at least one media report about his golf career, which included a long list of his many accolades and titles won both before and after playing at WSU, he was called a “student of swing.”
“I’ve seen his swing,” Pompeo reports with evident admiration. “He just attacks the ball – he’s a warrior, a happy warrior. I think he attacks his work with the same kind of intensity and skill.”
So, as different as Stevens and Tomblin may be, they share some core similarities. For one thing, each of them is a skilled innovator. Each one is a student of motion, of collaboration, of transformation. And they both attack challenges in exactly the same way – full throttle.
