Where safety-critical engineering meets general aviation.
General aviation operates in a different world than the one that develops spacecraft, military systems, and civil transport aircraft. In those domains, formal safety review, rigorous test methodology, and systems-level causation analysis are routine. In light GA they are rare, even though the consequences of getting it wrong are just as real.
SO(3) brings two decades of aviation experience together with a background in national-scale, safety-critical spaceflight and defense engineering, and applies that combined discipline to the problems facing GA owners, operators, developers, and the counsel who represent them. The result is analysis grounded in how complex systems actually fail, and how to prove it, prevent it, or design around it.
Dr. Jeb Orr is the founder and principal member of Special Orthogonal Group, LLC. Dr. Orr has over 20 years of experience in the design, development, test, and operations of large-scale, safety-critical systems including launch vehicles, spacecraft, entry vehicles, and aircraft.
His technical career centers on flight dynamics, guidance and control, systems integration, and system safety across both crewed and uncrewed vehicles. He has held senior roles supporting national spaceflight and defense programs, with deep involvement in flight control design, flight test, and the investigation of complex, multi-disciplinary system failures.
Dr. Orr is co-author of a graduate-level textbook on the flight mechanics of launch vehicles and a recipient of the NASA Exceptional Engineering Achievement Medal. He has served as chairman of the Aerospace Control and Guidance Systems Committee, an independent professional body, and has taught graduate-level short courses in dynamics, control, estimation, and signal processing. He holds a Ph.D. in Engineering, with a concentration in control systems, from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
Dr. Orr is an instrument-rated private pilot and commercial remote pilot with over 1,500 hours of flight experience in fixed-wing aircraft.