Jay Antognini was born in 1950. His fascination with airplanes began with the X-planes during his childhood in California, with special inspiration from the North American Aviation X-15. Jay was enthralled by the Blue Angels demonstration team flying F-4 Phantoms. He couldn’t get enough of the land speed record cars at Bonneville as he was growing up.

Jay earned his degree in Aeronautical engineering from California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) San Luis Obispo in 1973 during which time he visited the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB. His interest in radio controlled sailplanes started during college and he flew and designed many of them including flying wing sailplanes. During college Jay became enthralled with motorcycles which he owned and rode his entire adult life.

Jay started his aerospace career in 1973 at Rockwell International (North American Aviation) as a flight controls design, development and test/flight test engineer for all the autopilot modes on the B-1A. He then worked on loan to Rockwell Collins and McDonald Douglas on various commercial aircraft flight controls subsystems. Jay was the Space Shuttle Ascent lead lab test/flight test engineer for launches 1 through 7. Jay moved to Northrop in the early eighties where he was the cradle-to-grave responsible engineer for B-2A Terrain Following. It was during the latter part of this effort that Jay moved to Oklahoma to support the B-2A bomber at Tinker AFB. Jay then transitioned to being the B-2A Flight Plan Management subsystem responsible engineer. He also participated in other Northrop classified programs. Jay retired from his aerospace career after an amazing 45 years. His passion was flight testing at Edwards AFB and supporting the B-2A bomber pilots at Whiteman AFB.

Jay was fascinated with speed, acceleration, maneuverability and aerodynamics his whole life. His personalized motorcycle license plates were VEEDOT in California and VDOT in Oklahoma.

Jay owes his career and interests to his dad Joe for teaching him how to design and build stuff, his mom Jean for appreciating his ability to learn and fostering it, his brother Joey for getting him into motorcycles and his wife Kim for supporting him most of his adult life in pursuing his aeronautical and motorcycle interests.

Jay’s career was enabled by hundreds of fantastic people who made it worthwhile and enjoyable to be an aerospace engineer for a life time. Most of those people went totally unnoticed, but they were the ones who created fantastic flying machines so that pilots and astronauts could use them for the good of mankind and to just plain push the envelope.

Finally, Jay acknowledges that none of his fantastic Aerospace journey would have been possible without God and His son Jesus Christ in his life. Jay’s innate talents and skills were God given. The opportunities throughout his career and life time were God given.