Alumni Spotlight – Kellan Grainger
Kellan Grainger is a 2018 graduate of Hilliard Bradley High School where he took full advantage of the district’s engineering pathway. This provided him with a head start on college and his future career goals.
He went on to attend the University of Cincinnati and graduated in 2023 with a degree in aerospace engineering. He participated in several co-ops throughout college, including working for Maverick Molding, which manufactures high-performance polymers and composites for jet engines, as an engineer with Rhinestahl Customer Tooling Solutions, a global leader in aircraft engine tooling, and as an engineer at Honda R&D where he worked in development. Each experience further solidified his love for engineering, and aeronautics specifically.
Today, he is a staff engineer in Flight Simulator Engineering for United Airlines in Colorado. The facility at which he works houses 63 full-motion, full-cockpit flight simulators. His role involves maintaining seven of these simulators and six flight training devices on which pilots train to fly the 737 MAX.
The simulators are used up to 20 hours per day with pilots training in four-hour segments. Grainger said they are similar to a videogame, which needs constant updates, but the technology evolves at a much higher level.
Hilliard presented him with the opportunity to learn coding starting in middle school, which directly impacts his career today. He said his engineering teachers throughout high school, particularly Mr. Armelie, also encouraged his interest in the field. In fact, they inspired him to one day want to teach engineering classes.
