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Recent BYU Grad Improves Avionics at L3Harris

Sean Article_0.jpg

Sean Crawford, a recent graduate of the BYU Electrical Engineering program, was offered a position at L3Harris in Waco, Texas. According to a June 2019 press release, L3Harris was awarded $499 million “to design, produce, and certify a state-of-the-art modernization solution for a fleet of 176 Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve C-130H aircraft to improve aircraft availability, reliability and sustainability.” Crawford was hired to work on the avionics of these aircrafts.

He said, “We are upgrading the avionics equipment on it. The avionic equipment basically is everything that is in the cockpit with the pilot, the co-pilot, the navigator, and the engineer. They all have different read-outs that they’re looking at that involve navigation, pretty much all the electrical controls on the aircraft itself. We’re getting a complete overhaul to modernize it, essentially.”

As a recent hire, Crawford has been spending his time familiarizing himself with the massive aircrafts. He explained that reviewing the high-level block diagrams has helped him understand which parts of the plane are being removed and replaced.

He explained further, “A typical day is going through and deciding what electrical components in the aircraft we’re going to remove, which ones we’re going to salvage and re-use. We’re starting the process of bringing out the new cables and circuits when the aircrafts actually come in.”

In the future when the design is finished, he and his coworkers will act as the liaison between the technicians and the project engineers to ensure that the project turns out according to plan.

Crawford attributes much of his ability to complete the necessary tasks at L3Harris to what he learned as an undergraduate student at BYU.

He said, “For the job I’m doing, with Capstone and radio astronomy research with Doctors Jeffs and Warnick, I actually had to deal with the decision-process of what kinds of connectors to use, what types of cables to use. We had to take a concept, decide how to get there, decide what materials to use, build it, test it to see if it works, so it was more of the full engineering process. That was definitely very important.”

In fact, Crawford explained that at L3Harris and other companies he has relationships with, each company asked what he learned during his participation in Capstone.

Since his time in Capstone and graduation from BYU, Crawford began the online master’s program in Electrical Engineering at the University of Arizona. He felt prepared for the program because of his BYU experience.

“In talking with other students and the BYU students that are elsewhere, the undergraduate program in electrical engineering is phenomenal at BYU”, he said. “I definitely feel like especially with my graduate work at Arizona, I’ve come out ahead compared to what some of the other students have had with their undergraduate.”