It was probably Flight Test's only day off from testing in a month, so like all good Flight Test Engineers, they could smell a party and were there. Reece E. Ollenburg was among them with a drink in hand watching airplane videos. Unbelievable, right? Finally, a day off and he still couldn't get enough of his job. He was truly a man who loved aviation.

Reece may have bemoaned the long test flights on the aircraft, but he never got tired of talking about how great the data was that they collected. That was what he enjoyed about work - analyzing data. He would HAND PLOT data! That, in itself, is amazing these days. Nobody plots things by hand anymore. He was truly an old-school aviation engineer.

Reece had a saying which he included in the footer of every one of his emails. "In God we trust.... Everything else we test." That was Reece, the total and complete professional. He never took anything for granted. If he didn't generate the number, he wanted to know where the number came from and how it was calculated, and wasn't satisfied until he could repeat it himself.

Every flight test group is made up of a diverse set of talents and personalities, and Reece was probably the most even-keeled and technically competent out of all of the Flight Test Engineers. He was also about as much of a geek as he could be, using his iPhone as a Star Wars light saber, and then immediately turning it into a hand held accelerometer.

Reece was an airplane-crazed workaholic who crisscrossed the country searching for the next hot flight test program. He graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in Aerospace Engineering 1986. Following graduation he moved to Long Beach, California where he worked for McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Company. From there, he went on to work for Lockheed Martin in Marietta, Georgia, Bombardier in Wichita, Kansas, and Lockheed in Ft. Worth, Texas. He spent the last two years of his career and life working for Gulfstream in Savannah, Georgia.