John Hearing is a systems engineering specialist with over 40 years of experience in complex civilian and military systems. He is currently a consultant for risk management and systems engineering for many companies, teaches systems engineering classes for Caltech, and is an Adjunct Professor for the U.S. Naval War College. He serves with the U.S. Forest Service in his free time as a Wilderness Ranger and Forest Fire Lookout.
Previously, Mr. Hearing held a variety of positions in the commercial airplanes and defense divisions of Boeing including leading projects related to creating common requirements for future airplanes; creating databases to capture safety lessons learned; leading and teaching processes for finding Root Cause Corrective Actions (RCCA); establishing and managing core processes for systems engineering; managing software efforts for controlling unmanned vehicles; developing intelligence collection modifications to commercial airplanes; working on long-endurance, high-altitude unmanned vehicles; and developing software for decision support for military planners.
Mr. Hearing served 20 years in the U.S. Navy as an intelligence officer, where he managed procurement programs related to space systems, including the first major introduction of wide-band commercial SATCOM on Navy ships (Project CHALLENGE ATHENA). He also served as a program auditor for the Secretary of Defense; led training operations; and served on deployed aircraft carriers, destroyers, and cruisers.
Mr. Hearing holds multiple patents on a wide variety of topics, ranging from methods of modifying airplanes to software architecture for optimizing the use of intelligence collection assets. In addition, he has published several articles on communications architectures and program management.
Mr. Hearing earned his Master's of Science in Systems Technology (Space Systems Operations) from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA where he graduated with distinction and with a Master’s Thesis focusing on satellite communications to afloat vessels. He has a B.A. in political science from the University of Washington, Seattle, WA.