Two graduates from the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics were among Program Excellence Award winners.

Todd Probert (MSAAE ’89, OAE ’17) and Ted Torgerson (BSAAE ’83, OAE ’17) were honored by Aviation Week Network during a banquet Oct. 23. Torgerson and his team was awarded with the Game Changer Award for the Boeing T-X/T-7A Advanced Pilot Training System. Probert earned the OEM Sustainment award for the Raytheon Air Force Air Operations Center.

The Game Changer Award was given for only the second time in Program Excellence history. It recognizes a new model for defense contracting bids and a proposal that disrupts the processes around design and development, production and working with the supply chain, an Aviation Week Network release said.

The Program Excellence Awards recognize the best of the best each year, the release said, and the process was designed to use an evaluation/scoring process to support the professional development of program/project leaders at companies.

Torgerson is the program integration lead for the system, which was developed by Boeing on its partner Saab. The system used model-based engineering to develop a product prior to the competition, building in the flexibility to evolve as technologies, missions and training needs change, allowing the system to be relevant for decades, the release said. The system was designed to provide a safer, more efficient training approach that produces more capable pilots more quickly. About three years after setting a firm concept, the team built two production-relevant jets, driving time out of the design and development timeline, the release said.

Probert, Raytheon’s vice president of C2 space and intelligence, was honored for the Air Force Air Operations Center program that is deployed to 22 locations and serves as command-and-control centers. They receive, host and parse incoming data used in “fusion warfare,” the release said. The core function, air tasking orders, has gone from a highly manual process to a more accurate, faster automated system.