Eric Wightman

Eric Wightman, Vice President of Advanced Materials at Karman Space and Defense has over 20 years of experience in advanced materials for the aerospace and defense markets.  Throughout Eric’s career, he has grown capabilities to support some of the most challenging demands and capabilities such as Carbon/Carbon processing and development, ablative materials, metallic thermal forming, structural composites development, and manufacturing to name a few.  Before growing the Advanced Materials group at Karman, Eric built from the ground up the Composites engineering team as well as the manufacturing capability at Systima which includes the current world-class material test lab capability. Before Systima, Eric served as a process engineer at Safran in Marysville, WA as a process engineer supporting the bulk resin infusion process for 787-8 primary structures.

Eric started his career as an NHRA top fuel funny crew member and had hands-on composites exposure fabricating 10,000 HP, nitromethane burning race cars and exposed Eric to some of the most challenging environments as well as mission-critical demands in order to win. After leaving the racing world and prior to Safran Eric served as a material and process engineer at Applied Composites, Indianapolis.  This role was a very dynamic role where Eric would own entire project scopes that included laminate design, tooling design, and fab and overall part fabrication to deliver the most challenging structural composites to support the aerospace and Defense market.