Col Eileen Bjorkman, USAF, Retired

Colonel Eileen Bjorkman, USAF, Retired
M.S. Aeronautical Engineering, 1986 and B.S. Aeronautical Engineering, 1982

Ms. Eileen Bjorkman has had quite the career since graduating from AFIT with Bachelors and Masters degrees in Aeronautical Engineering.  She is currently a Senior Level executive serving as Technical Advisor at the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB, Calif.  Her job is seeing how to better integrate the use of statistical techniques into the flight test process and how to deal with various range encroachment issues.  Before entering the civilian side, Ms. Bjorkman served 30 years on active duty and recently retired as a Colonel.  During her military career she served as a flight test engineer, instructor and test squadron commander.  She was a senior non-rated aircrew member and flew more than 700 hours as a flight test engineer in over 25 different aircraft, primarily the F-4, F-16, C-130 and C-141. 
 
Ms. Bjorkman’s testing career has led to several awards and publications. She was a distinguished graduate from AFIT when she attended during both her undergraduate and graduate studies. She was named the Military Analyst of the Year in 1995, and the Military Tester of the Year in 2008. Ms. Bjorkman has been published several times in the International Test and Evaluation Association Journal.  She has also been published in Sport Aviation, the publication of the Experimental Aircraft Association.
 
Ms. Bjorkman’s love of flying has extended into her personal life as well. She owns a Decathlon aircraft that she uses on the weekends for aerobatics. She is also currently working on a PhD in Systems Engineering. When asked for advice that helped her become so successful, Ms. Bjorkman said to “never stop learning even after graduating from AFIT”.  She has spent her career in a technical environment and says that whenever she finds a new and interesting topic, her first instinct is to find out as much about it as possible.  She credits her interest in chaos theory 20 years ago for her ability to understand the complex systems we have in today’s Air Force.