Jay Gundlach

B.S., AEROSPACE ENGINEERING, VIRGINIA TECH, 1998
M.S., Ph.D, AEROSPACE ENGINEERING FROM VIRGINIA TECH, 2000

Dr. Jay Gundlach, President of Gundlach Aerospace LLC, is a leading Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) subject matter expert with nearly three decades of experience in UAS product development. He founded Gundlach Aerospace is 2013 to support UAS product development, strategy, and DOD program offices. Recently he founded and served as CEO of RapidFlight LLC, a company dedicated to advanced additive manufactured high-performance UAS. During this time, he was also a Managing Director for Tracker Capital Management and Cerberus Capital Management with emphasis on aerospace and defense investments. Dr. Gundlach co-founded FlightHouse Engineering LLC in 2016, which specializes in detail design and prototyping. Dr. Gundlach was Director of Conceptual Design at Aurora Flight Sciences, where he led advanced aircraft studies, successfully led large capture efforts (DARPA TERN and VTOL X-Plane), and served as the Orion Ultra-Long Endurance (ULE) UAS program manager. Dr. Gundlach was Insitu’s Vice President of Advanced Development, where he invented and led the development of the Integrator product (now the Navy’s RQ-21A Blackjack STUAS program of record), managed research projects, developed the product roadmap, and oversaw the integration of over a dozen payloads into ScanEagle and Integrator. Earlier, he worked at the Naval Research Laboratory as a contractor where he helped develop 17 UASs and as a contractor supporting Lockheed Martin Aeronautical Systems in advanced transport research. Dr. Gundlach earned his Ph.D. and MS from Virginia Tech with research on Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) of advanced transport aircraft and UASs. Over his career, Dr. Gundlach has worked on over 60 unique UAS types that achieved at least first flight. His UAS designs have cumulatively achieved well over a million operational flight hours. Dr. Gundlach has written three authoritative textbooks on UAS design and teaches short courses.