It was a very interesting talk with my old roommate and his first bit of advice is to Google " Navy AEDO" for their website for more information than you have ever wanted to know. It will also introduce you to government Power Point at a guaranteed sleep level but it is still valuable. He became a helo pilot, served about 3.5 years of sea tours, got a masters at Princeton, and applied for and got Test Pilot school at Patuxtent River Naval Air Station, the home of Navy research and development. He applied and got AEDO status and a few years later left the Navy to work for NASA. He still wanted to fly so he joined the Air Force Reserves (horrors!) and both flew and did AEDO stuff for the Blue Suiters and finished a career at NASA (as well as the Air Force Reserves). Next he became an Aero Engineering prof at the Naval Academy and if you go there, be sure and visit the huge, armored test cell he developed for helicopter rotor blade development that the Mids use in their senior projects.
He was very enthusiastic on the AEDO field if an officer is not interested in the normal command career and, to my surprise, said the promotion opportunities for AEDOs is very good up to and including Admiral---all within the aviation engineering field, of course. This was a shocker to me but when he went over all the world-wide repair and rework facilities, manufacturing teams, research facilities, and testing jobs I realized just how big the field was. With robotics, both air and water coming onboard, they are really looking for sharp engineers who want to make the Navy a career. He told me the relationship between aircraft corporations and the Navy has changed with the Navy far more involved in the manufacturing, modifications, testing of an aircraft than in the past. Whether that is good or bad is another subject but Navy AEDOs are very much in the mix at manufacturers--mostly in specification, testing, and oversight roll. AEDOs are at China Lake, the desert testing facility in California, heavily involved in the "after market" aspect of design and testing of an aircraft such as: can an aircraft be controllable with ordinance hung up on it, off-center arresting problems, developing best practices on loading, maintenance, and emergency procedures. Patuxtent River is today a huge research and development facility with thousands of engineering personnel, both AEDOs and government civilians. In this environment, the AEDOs form teams with civilian counterparts to tackle the problems of UAVs and the F-35 and have close contact with the test pilots themselves, in fact, some of the AEDOs are the test pilots.
At the Air Rework and Repair facilities, also scattered around the world where major depot-level repair is done, AEDOs are heavily involved with the supervision of repair and overhauls as well as setting up production lines, tool development, problem solving, getting the aircraft back out the door on time.
I asked him what he thought about a young man going to a prestigious engineering school vice the Naval Academy and he had good reasons to pick USNA over a civilian school. The main draw is the operational experience that an Academy grad gets, both in flying and supervising men prior to becoming an AEDO. Test pilot school adds more gold plating and a Master's Degree even more. Interestingly enough, an MBA is looked upon with favor as the higher you go in rank, the more the MBA knowledge and skills come into play. Sooner or later, you retire and as a middle life engineer your supervisory skills combined with technical knowledge are a highly sought commodity by the civilian world. It also cannot be denied that the Academy diploma means a lot regarding leadership on top of all the other stuff. By going the Navy route you also insure that you do not get buried in a big corporation's cubicle beehive for endless years doing 3-D modeling.
Since this is all second hand, I apologize in advance for any errors and, again, hopefully, some EDOs will chime in. My above comment in a previous post about limited advancement opportunities is, happily, wrong.
