On Earth or In Space, Andrew Allen Has the Right Stuff

On March 9, 1996, the space shuttle Columbia touched down on runway 33 and Commander Andrew Allen signed off from the cockpit: “Houston, Columbia. Wheel stop Kennedy Space Center.”

“That’s the best feeling,” says Allen (MBA ’04), who was wrapping up his third shuttle mission. “You’re home.”

The moment was poignant, too. With those seven words, Allen’s career as a spaceman ended. He had promised his daughters it would be his last shuttle trip, but as Columbia descended and he peered below at one of the rarest sights in the universe, he took a moment to fix the pale blue dot in his mind.

“I remember looking down at the Earth as we were getting ready to deorbit and thinking, this is the last time I’m going to see this view,” Allen says. “No picture does it justice. It’s surreal.”

Before the flight, Allen’s preteen daughters had seen the movie “Apollo 13,” the mission famous for the line “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” depicting the harrowing and heroic measures to bring the Apollo spacecraft safely back to Earth. They wanted dad on the ground, and NASA, too, had plans to keep Allen earthbound in the nerve center of operations at Kennedy Space Center.

As a member of the most elite pilot corps in the world, flying had been his life – ever faster, ever higher – but Allen figured his next challenge might be on terra firma.

Eyes on the Sky

As a child, Allen was as at home in the air as on the ground. His father, a World War II torpedo bomber who became a civilian flight instructor, let Allen tag along with him from the age of 5 or 6. Allen learned to fly almost by osmosis. In 1969, he watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon on the family’s black and white TV, and his mother asked him if he might want to go to space one day.

“I said, ‘yes, mom, but I don’t think astronauts have detentions,’” Allen recalls of his junior high school days. “I had a fair amount at that time.”

His mom told him to focus, work hard and stay out of trouble, and the advice stuck.

“I joke sometimes the difference between me being a felon or an astronaut was focus,” Allen says. “Wanting to fly these high-tech airplanes gave me focus.”

His original goal was to be a test pilot, and he knew that would require an engineering degree. Test pilots are like airborne troubleshooters, a liaison between those who design and build planes and those who fly. They need to speak the same language.

“When you are the first to do something in an airplane, you have to transition from knowing how to fly an airplane to knowing how an airplane flies,” Allen says. “That’s engineering.”

Armed with his degree, he entered the Marine Corps and started flight school, where eagle-eyed instructors keep a keen eye on how trainees cope with stress.

“They make it hard on purpose. They draw a stress performance curve for us on the first day of flight school, which shows the higher your stress goes, the higher your performance goes,” Allen says. “They say, ‘we’re going to stress you up to this level, and we hope that’s near your peak. If you peak before that, we’re going to be real quick about getting rid of you.’”

Training starts on propeller planes, and about half don’t make it through. Of the remaining trainees, the majority gravitate to helicopters. Those who want to be “a fast mover,” Allen says, have to be in the top 30%, and the top 10-15% of that group got to fly the supersonic jets: F-4 Phantoms and the then-new F-18s.

Out of the fighter squadrons, only the top 25% go to what Allen calls post-graduate school: Top Gun.

Best of the Best

Top Gun in real life differs from “Top Gun” the movie. Top Gun pilots are competitive, yes, survivors of an extreme winnowing process that has made them the best of the best. But arrogance isn’t well tolerated; the pilots have to be team players.

“You want to be at the top of your class,” Allen says, “but it’s real easy to get humbled in that world.”

Allen was at happy hour at the officer’s club when actor Tom Cruise was filming the first “Top Gun” movie. He thought the guy getting all the attention was a colonel’s son until someone filled him in. He enjoyed both movies but says the second, “Top Gun: Maverick,” had the most realistic flying sequences.

“I could tell they were actually pulling G’s,” Allen says. “Maybe just 3 G’s, not 9 G’s, but you could tell.”

Although the movies romanticize fighter pilots, they were a clarion call, recruiting a new generation that wanted to take to the air to serve their country, and Allen gives the movies a thumbs up on that front.

But Top Gun was not his ultimate goal; there was one more step. He applied to test pilot school, where only 4% of applicants are chosen, and got in. That stress curve? Straight up.

As Allen navigated the stressors, he had two clear goals.

“One, always have as many landings as takeoffs,” Allen says. “Two, I never wanted to stand up in front of the ready room and have to talk about something that went wrong.”

In the world of military aviation, the ready room is designed to help pilots learn from each other. If you’re standing in front of the ready room, you’re explaining a mistake and how you recovered from it or an unforeseen event that required smart, lightning-fast decisions. The pilot explains why he did this and why he didn’t do that.

One day, it was Allen’s turn. He had been practicing a low-altitude flight at about 600 mph, when a turkey buzzard came through the cockpit glass, hit the ejection seat gear and smashed into Allen’s face before disintegrating into a cloud of blood and guts and feathers.

“Even though a turkey buzzard is a little thing, for a millisecond it was a cannonball,” Allen says.

Covered in blood, Allen didn’t know how much was his and how much was the bird’s. He couldn’t see out of one eye and wondered if he’d lost it. Wind was rushing in. The ejection seat gear looked iffy.

His training kicked in, and almost on autopilot, he traded airspeed for altitude to get away from the ground to buy split seconds for assessments: Is there a closer airfield, is it better to head for home base, can I see, can I use the radio, am I going to bleed to death?

“You sort through that stuff,” says Allen.

Then, make a decision.

“The airplane wasn’t going to fly itself. I needed to fly the airplane if I was going to survive.”

The landing column matched the takeoff column. The split-second decision not to eject turned out to be the right decision. The mechanism was damaged.

“I wouldn’t have lived that day if I had tried to eject,” Allen says.

Allen says he almost quit flying after losing two friends in flight accidents. His mentors warned him the longer he waited, the harder it would be to get back in the air. The first flight was tough, and Allen says he was a little scared.

“But it was my job,” Allen says. “I happen to have the right DNA that lets me do this kind of a job. I picked this.”

Into Space

When the movie “Star Wars” came out, Allen was in an F4 squadron. About 20 Marine pilots and “backseaters” went to see it in the theater. Afterward, they agreed that 1) there will always be fighter pilots, 2) there will always be fighter bars and 3) backseaters are going to be replaced by robots.

Allen had topped out, flying the airplanes that nudge the stratosphere. Then the shuttle program, stalled after the Challenger accident in 1986, started again.

A fraction of 1% of the 12,000 or so aces who apply are chosen. Allen was among the 21 Marines sent to NASA and made the short list of 120 candidates who were interviewed by psychologists and tested. Fifteen astronauts made the cut, including one token Marine: Allen.

“The hardest part about being an astronaut is being selected,” Allen says.

The cockpit got a little more complicated, with about 1,500 switches. Flip one the wrong way, Allen says, and “it’s a bad day for everyone.” Allen estimates he spent 5,000 hours in a simulator, becoming very familiar with the line between good decisions and bad ones and learning to focus on the things he could control.

He was grateful for every hour of training on his first shuttle mission, when the shuttle team was checking on a European satellite. He was alone in the cockpit at night and couldn’t see the satellite, although he could monitor it on a radar screen. The two-hour checkup had turned into six hours, and the rest of the crew was below deck having dinner. In every orbit, there was dead time when he could not communicate with mission control in Houston.

The conditions were gathering for a perfect storm: It was dark, he couldn’t see the satellite, there was no signal, and he was alone in the cockpit. Then the satellite command center in Germany, intending to send a signal that would rotate the satellite, fired the jets instead. The satellite headed right for Atlantis.

“It’s only 1,000 feet away, and it’s accelerating. You’ve got a pilot, me, not sure what’s going on,” Allen says.

The satellite had large solar arrays, and pilots are taught that firing the shuttle’s bigger rockets could destroy them. The little navigational jets on the side of the shuttle, however, weren’t going to dodge the satellite.

“Is the radar telling me the truth or is the radar off? If it’s telling me the truth, we’re only 15-20 seconds from impact.”

Allen fired the rockets.

“It sounds like cannons going off, baboom, baboom, baboom, and shakes the orbiter. The commander downstairs yelled up, ‘what are you doing up there?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’”

The collision was averted, but the satellite disappeared from view, until dawn, when they spotted it flying serenely over the Kennedy Space Center, its arrays undamaged.

“A lot of things that could go wrong, went wrong. But the last link in the chain is the pilot, and it was up to me to break the chain,” Allen says. “Things can go wrong in a heartbeat, and all of a sudden there’s a millisecond between living or dying.”

Risky Business

When Allen returned to Earth and the business of space, he turned to UF for his MBA.

After the hazards of air and space, an earthbound job might seem like a cakewalk. Not so, says Allen.

Running ground operations for the shuttle program is as much a matter of life and death and training as being a pilot. The team of 5,000 or so people worked about a million hours between the time an orbiter landed until the time it launched again, making sure the orbiter was ready to fly – and keep the crew safe.

When the worst happens, the grief is palpable. Allen was on the runway with families waiting for Columbia to come home in 2003 when it disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere. He lost close friends, but realized his team was grieving, too.

“It’s like family. They don’t come to work to punch a clock; they want to do a great job for NASA, the nation,” Allen says. “They took it personally.”

Investigations, he says, are designed to make sure a preventable error doesn’t happen again.

“In the world of aviation, if it’s not pilot error, it’s maintenance error,” Allen says.

Honesty matters as much as technical skills in the world of NASA. In one investigation, Allen says a worker lost a wrench during maintenance on the solid rocket boosters. The worker went to a hardware store, bought the identical tool, etched it to match the lost tool and put it back in the toolbox.

The flight launched, orbited, landed.

“As a crew was taking the solid rocket boosters apart, out falls a wrench,” Allen says.

Allen has watched workers record mistakes in a logbook, taking personal responsibility in an elaborate system of checks and balances designed to mitigate the inherent risks of space flight. You can fix the mistakes you know about it. Hiding a mistake, he says, is risky.

“In the end, it’s about trusting people,” Allen says. “Just like this little company.”

That little company is Aerodyne Industries, a company that provides services to aerospace contractors and NASA, and it’s not so little any more.

When Allen started it in 2006, he was its sole employee and labored alone until 2012, when he hired seven people.

The business world has its own stress, something that became clear to him one night when he was listening to his two young sons say their prayers before bed.

“In unison, they said, ‘dear God, please help Aerodyne be successful.’ I thought that was nice. Then they added, ‘so we don’t have to live under a bridge.’

“That’s a different kind of stress because now it’s your family,” Allen says. “When I look back on it, when I wore a flight suit to work, life was kind of easy. Managing that kind of risk was something I knew how to do.”

That Allen has learned a thing or two is clear. Today, he supports eight NASA centers with 860 employees in 10 states. Having an MBA, he says, likely gave him the confidence to start a business, and in 2022, he was an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for Florida.

“This is probably the most humbling thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Allen says.

Today’s Space Mission

Low Earth orbit is beginning to teem with commerce, and Allen says it’s time for entrepreneurs to take over where astronauts left off, perhaps building hotels and offering honeymoons in space. Would his own wife, Brenda, have been up for that?

“She would have gone in a heartbeat,” says Allen, noting that she was a payload communications engineer when they met.

Today’s astronauts have more work to do, getting to the Moon and Mars and eventually outside the solar system, Allen says, a project that will require more than the half penny of every tax dollar that currently goes to NASA.

“In Apollo, we got a great return on investment, whether from people going into scientific fields or economics or technology,” Allen says. “We didn’t spend enough after Apollo. The technology could have easily been developed to have a colony on the moon by now.

“We could have been on Mars by now if we so desired.”

With other countries poised for their own space travels, it will be important for the U.S. to lead the next space race and establish space bases along the way.

“That’s kind of who we are,” Allen says. “The U.S. needs to plant the flag on the moon again.”