Working as a mathematician for the Propulsion and Power Division of the Naval Air Systems Command, Gerda Mehwald Picco was a pioneer in the formulation and use of computational methods in the design, development and performance prediction of the engines in our modern day turbine-powered aircraft.

Prior to the development of the desktop PC and handheld computers, turbo machinery was designed and analyzed by using sliderules and large mechanical desktop calculating machines such as Frieden Calculators. Digital computers were room-sized affairs using stacks upon stacks of "punch cards" with each card depicting a single step in a calculation written in several obscure computing languages including Fortran.

Gerda mastered the use of these mechanical, and often times difficult to use, computational devices to develop mathematical models which simulated each aircraft turbine engine design under development by the United States Navy. The accuracy of these mathematical computations was essential for determining the better performing engine design during engine development competitions, and more importantly, for estimating whether the proposed engine design would in fact result in improved performance for the U.S. Navy's fleet of aircraft. Even with the computers and calculators of the 1960s and 1970s, Gerda's performance predictions were consistently corroborated as each engine design progressed from its "paper design" on into full-sized developmental test engines and eventual operational service.

Some of the United States Navy's aircraft and engine systems that were evaluated by these techniques:

- F-4 Phantom upgrade with the J79-10 engine
- A-7E Corsair II to the TF-41 engine
- F-14A Tomcat with the TF 30 series of engines
- F-14 Tomcat with the F400 & F401 competition
- F-18A Hornet with the F404 engine family
- H-53 with the T-64 engine upgrades
- P-3 Orion with T-56 family upgrades
- V-22 Osprey engine competition

As the development and complexity of computers progressed, Gerda improved her mathematical models to make them as sophisticated as the state-of-the-art would permit. The mathematical calculations performed on the old mechanical computers were metamorphosed by Gerda into digital computer models, which could replicate turbine engines down to very minute levels of performance. As Gerda improved the Navy's engine performance prediction capabilities, so did the propulsion industry. A common set of turbine engine computer input parameters, as well as agreed to methods of performance calculations, was developed throughout the propulsion industry. This "standardization" of computational methods for turbine engines was due to pioneers like Gerda. By coming to an industry agreement, sets of turbine engine performance prediction data, which were previously carefully hand drawn, were developed into digital data capable of being machine plotted or used as direct inputs into the aircraft designer's aircraft performance prediction computer programs.

The average home computer of today far exceeds the computational capability available to the aircraft industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Turbine engine performance prediction can now be done on handheld computers. Without the diligent work done by aviation pioneers like Gerda Mehwald Picco, the use of computers for aircraft engine design would have been delayed by many years.