A Higher Calling: A GE Aerospace Leader’s Lifelong Mission to ‘Bring Them Home Safely’

Every morning, Terri Braun Voutsas wakes up and reaches straight for her phone. "I'm checking for events," says Braun Voutsas, the executive director of flight safety at GE Aerospace. "Events" is industry terminology for jet engine-caused accidents or incidents that pose some risk to an airplane.

Thinking about engine safety before breakfast might sound stressful, but it's second nature to Braun Voutsas, who has just chalked off her 35th year at GE Aerospace.

In 2023, the company recorded zero engine-related events, improving on a strong five-year record of 0.04 incidents per one million departures. That is no mean feat, given that an aircraft with an engine manufactured by GE Aerospace or one of its partners takes off every two seconds. But Braun Voutsas won't break her morning ritual, because she remembers July 19, 1989, like it was yesterday.

It was a warm Wednesday afternoon 35 years ago and Braun Voutsas, who had started working full-time in GE Aerospace's life management division just two weeks earlier, was at her desk in Cincinnati, poring over calculations for rotating jet engine parts. The news began to reverberate around the offices. United Airlines Flight 232, traveling from Denver to Chicago, had crash-landed in Sioux City, Iowa, killing 111 of the 296 people on board. At the center of a series of failures leading to the crash was GE Aerospace's CF6 engine. "It's something you never forget," says Braun Voutsas. "I still get goose bumps thinking about it."

The disaster was devastating to the industry and GE Aerospace, and then it led to an industry-wide safety transformation. From that day forward, GE Aerospace led from the front on flight safety, making it foundational to everything it does. In 2013, the company was the first manufacturer to roll out a safety management system (SMS), a decade before the Federal Aviation Administration proposed the requirement. Today, everywhere from the shop floor to the boardroom is an open, safe space for raising safety concerns. And engineers and technicians have developed newer and more thorough techniques for inspecting engine parts, using, among other things, the same ultrasound tech found at a doctor's office and the same X-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanning used by art museum restorers to see through layers of a Renaissance painting.

Sioux City has also defined Braun Voutsas' career. "Safety has always been at the forefront of my mind," she says. "Like many of my colleagues, I've made it my life's mission to make sure it never happens again."

Making a Career Out of Math

Growing up as one of three girls to a single mom in Cincinnati, Braun Voutsas' talent for math and science was obvious. But she had another love: the great outdoors. As a teen, she'd even imagined herself working as a forest ranger. Fate intervened in her final year of high school, when she started babysitting for a neighbor who worked as a scientist at a major company, and they got to chatting about their passions. Braun Voutsas had something of an epiphany: You could make a whole career out of math. The neighbor had a big impact on her, she remembers. Later that year, she earned a place in the mechanical engineering program at the University of Cincinnati.

It was a smart call. Attending school just down the road allowed Braun Voutsas to live at home and save on her expenses. The University of Cincinnati also ran an extensive co-op program, which allowed students to alternate semesters between the lecture hall and a workplace for one year of their course. In her second year, Braun Voutsas accepted a co-op placement at GE Aerospace.

She had lucked out, finding her vocation in her backyard even before she'd graduated. "In simple terms, I was working at a company that put a motor on an airplane, which made it fly," she says. "That was so fascinating." Braun Voutsas spent the year shuttling between home, the GE Aerospace labs, and the university. "I was continuing my studies, making some money, and trying the trade."

Even as an engineering co-op, she felt the weight of responsibility every time she crunched the numbers. "Even the slightest miscalculation on the energy of a rotating part would have a negative impact on the airplane," she says. When she graduated with a year in the industry under her belt, the world was Braun Voutsas' oyster. But GE Aerospace already felt like home. "I decided to take a role, maybe stay five years, and then go someplace else," she says. "I'm still here 35 years later."

An Unforgettable Day

Then came the fateful day. A little over an hour into Flight 232's voyage to Chicago, a rotating fan disk in the McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10's tail-mounted CF6 engine failed catastrophically. Debris from the engine sliced through all three of the airplane's hydraulic lines, disabling all normal flight controls. The crew managed to use the throttles to bring the plane down for a crash landing at the airport in Sioux City, where the jet caught fire and broke into pieces.

Later, investigators discovered a half-inch crack in the fan disk that had been missed during a maintenance inspection. The crack was the result of a deviation in the process of melting titanium that allowed the metal to mix with oxygen, forming a material phase called hard alpha that is both brittle and weak.

Braun Voutsas remembers a shocked workplace. The impact on colleagues was evident. "You could physically see the emotions that they went through," she recalls.

Setting the Agenda

Numbness and shock soon turned into a keen sense of responsibility. Sioux City and flight safety shouldn't be taboo, decided GE Aerospace leaders. They encouraged all employees to start discussing the issues. Fred Herzner, the former chief engineer at GE Aerospace and Braun Voutsas' mentor, was instrumental in this effort. He set up the Safety Program Management Teams for each of the company's engine models, which helps to ensure collective responsibility for flight safety, ensuring that no one individual is responsible for a decision impacting safety. "He made it his life goal to ensure we had the right culture and systems in place," says Braun Voutsas.

Leaders reached out to the rest of the aerospace industry, ensuring that flight safety was always at the top of the agenda from then on. "All the way through to Chief Executive Larry Culp, our leaders have been top-notch in talking about it," Braun Voutsas explains. "It's turned into an open conversation, and a policy of zero retaliation on raising your hand. That can be anyone from the mechanic working on our jet engines to the trucker who is moving them."

GE Aerospace backed up the cultural change with the best technical talent in the industry. Its Life Management team, which establishes safe operating life limits for all the parts in an engine, threw its arms around math-minded engineers like Braun Voutsas, ensuring they had abundant resources and support. "We were a nucleus of people who did calculations, and we were very influential in the industry, setting the stage for the new era of flight safety," she says.

Leaders hired brilliant metallurgists to help engineers understand the properties of titanium and how it melts. Together they explained to the world how tiny defects in titanium can completely change the fatigue capability of rotating parts, turning them into a liability. "I knew if the fan disk broke free, you'd have something with the power of a locomotive," she says.

Soon a series of changes were implemented. The biggest was adopting a process called electron-beam cold hearth melting, to melt titanium used in alloys. The updated process eliminates hard alpha and reduces defects. GE Aerospace also increased its ultrasonic inspection of engine parts, using sound waves to detect cracks and defects that might be hard to see.

Safety Mantra

It's this combination of safety-first culture and empirical tenacity that has reduced events to practically zero. Along the way, Braun Voutsas has devised a kind of mantra on flight safety. "First, we try to stop events from occurring," she explains. "And if we do have an event, we make sure we learn from those, stop it happening again, and read it across all of our platforms."

She felt a surge of pride when the FAA accepted GE Aerospace's four-pillar SMS in 2017: policy, promotion, risk management, and assurance. "We were the first to get a voluntary system accepted, and it's a really strong system," she says. "We have an opportunity to build on that foundation and lead the industry."

Braun Voutsas has good news for people who still experience butterflies on takeoff. "Flying is so much safer today than it was in the 1980s. I think about the people flying today and I am confident that our products will get everyone home safely."

Image: GE Aerospace

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