Abraham Eaton

Captain Abraham M. Eaton currently serves as lead flight test engineer for the Viper Experimentation and Next-generation Operations Model (VENOM) division at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida for the 40^th Flight Test Squadron. In this role, he leads a diverse team of analysts, engineers, and aircrew to collaborate with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in developing autonomy solutions to fly on F-16 VENOM testbed aircraft.

Capt Eaton graduated and was commissioned from the U.S. Air Force Academy in May 2019. As an operations analyst and a flight test engineer with 50+ control room missions, he brings experience applying data science and machine learning to real-world problems, successfully implementing both process improvements and software solutions locally and in the cloud to improve reliability and efficiency. In his current assignment, Capt Eaton leads the testing efforts for the DARPA Artificial Intelligence Reinforcements (AIR) project, training and leading a team of data scientists to quantify and contextualize the performance of autonomous agents in beyond visual range air to air combat. This work has grown from prior work on the XQ-58A Valkyrie testbed, where Capt Eaton was the test conductor for the first flight test of a Group 5 Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle controlled in flight by a reinforcement-learning trained autonomous agent, and the first flight where two XQ-58A Valkyrie’s were controlled in flight by a fighter aircraft.

Prior to his current assignment, the captain was a student at the USAF Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, California and studied Business Analytics as a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.