From delayed deceleration to Zooming
On Nov. 21, 2019, the sun had set just a couple of hours before on an unseasonably warm day, and Jacqueline Thomas PhD ’20 found herself sitting on the edge of her seat in a typical meeting room in the William J. Hughes Technical Center, part of the Federal Aviation Administration, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Thomas, a graduate student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) at MIT, focused intently in front of a small monitor, her eyes fixed on the black screen illuminated by a white outline of the U.S. East Coast and the small, neon green dot that showed the Boeing 777 commercial airplane, which had flown nearly nine hours from Frankfurt, Germany, and was just about to land at Atlantic City International Airport. The last three minutes of this flight were crucial, and it was exactly the moment Thomas had been waiting for. Accompanied by her...