Aidan Drucker
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A rotating 3D view of an engineering assembly. The same model can be inspected in detail in the Projects section below.

McLean, Virginia

Aidan Drucker

Design it. Machine it. Fly it.

B.S. Mechanical Engineering, George Mason 2028·FAA Commercial Pilot

I'm looking for aerospace engineering work — airframe and mechanical design, on-site in the DC area. The rest of this page is the case for it: hardware I designed, built and flew, parts I machined to print, and the flying and academic record behind both.

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01 / Specification

Every screening gate,
answered up front.

Degree, dates, citizenship, availability, location. The fields a first-pass screen filters on, in one table, so you never have to open the résumé to find out whether I clear them.

Candidate specification Sheet 01
Availability, eligibility and qualifications
    02 / Projects

    Five assemblies.
    Every body has a job.

    Each of these is a working object before it is a model — something that carries a load, locates a component, seals a joint, or lets go on command. Open one up and the interfaces are the thing worth looking at. Orbit it, explode it, section it, isolate any body.

    Drag to orbit · Click a body to isolate

    02 / Ask

    Take one of my models apart. Every body in it is there to do something — carry a load, locate a part, seal a joint, or let go on command — and I can tell you which, and why it is shaped the way it is. One of these has already had that answer tested at 300 mph. I would like to be doing this on your hardware.

    03 / Flight test

    Then it stopped
    being a drawing.

    The Cork DD in the viewer above was built from that file and flown on 11 July 2026 at a club launch: 2,200 ft, 300 mph, dual-deployment recovery. Both events fired and it came back flyable. Everything on this sheet is from that flight.

    Flight record · CORK 11 JUL 2026
    01 · Liftoff

    Four and a half seconds, real time, no cut. It stands on the rail, the motor lights, and it is gone before the smoke clears.

    The CORK rocket climbing off its pad under thrust, exhaust plume beneath it and smoke spreading low across the grass.
    02 · Under thrust

    Off the pad and tracking straight. Orange fin can, chequered band, CORK down the body tube — the vehicle the assembly above describes.

    The vehicle descending against a white overcast sky: a large canopy at the top, the airframe hanging below it, a smaller canopy further down, and the lower airframe section beneath that — all on one vertical line.
    03 · Both events, descending

    Two canopies out at once, airframe hanging between them on one tethered chain. That is what a dual-deploy looks like when it works: nothing comes down free.

    Field-replaceable avionics bay · before / after Recovered flyable
    The avionics bay closed up in its coupler, held in one hand indoors before the launch. The plywood bulkhead on top carries two ejection charge wells, a steel U-bolt and four lever-nut terminals, all clean and unfired.
    04 · Before

    Closed up on the bench. Two ejection charge wells, wired back through four lever terminals; the U-bolt beside them is the single point every pound of recovery load passes through.

    The same bay held over a table on the launch field after recovery. Its Remove Before Flight tag is still on the arming pin, the shock cord is still knotted to the U-bolt on the sooted bulkhead, and the threaded rods and nuts holding the stack together are all still in place.
    05 · After

    The same unit on the field, minutes after the walk-back. Charges fired and the bulkhead sooted, but the stack is still bolted together, the shock cord is still on the U-bolt, and the arming pin still carries its tag.

    Both photographs are of the coupler section you can pull out of the assembly in the viewer above — the unit designed to be swapped at the field rather than at a bench. It went through 300 mph and two pyrotechnic events between these two frames and came back as one assembly: bulkheads seated, threaded rods and nuts in place, the recovery harness still where it was tied. That is what “recovered flyable” means, and it is why it is worth two frames rather than a sentence.

    Critical design review 06 · Motor mount
    Presenting at a critical design review, mid-gesture, in front of a projected slide headed “mount design”. The slide shows a CAD render of a rocket motor mount: a motor tube running through two plywood centering rings, with the fin can bonded around them.

    Defending the motor mount

    The assembly on the screen is the motor mount for the test vehicle that became CORK — motor tube, two centering rings, and the fin can that feeds thrust and fin loads into them. Motor selection and mount design were my scope for the review.

    A design review is where a drawing meets people who did not draw it. You bring the choice, the numbers behind it and the failure you are designing against, and either it survives the questions or it changes. This one survived, got built, and is the joint that took 300 mph on 11 July.

        Email me about a 2027 role
        04 / Pilot

        Commercial pilot,
        airplane single-engine land.

        Three years through a Part 141 syllabus. Instrument-rated before I held the commercial certificate. The panel below is live — drag the attitude indicator.

            05 / Record

            Every grade,
            and where the engineering A’s are.

            Engineering · graded A / A−

              2025–2026 sophomore year · mechanical engineering · full report card

              06 / Track

              Shop floor,
              classroom, cockpit.

              Where the hours went.

              07 / Capability

              What I use,
              and where I used it.

              Every line below names the work that backs it. No proficiency bars — a percentage next to a skill is a number nobody can check.

              08 / Contact

              Let's talk about
              2027.

              Email me