A Double Bruin Engineer’s Path from Plane-Watching as a Child to Boeing Leadership

As a boy growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles under the flight path of planes on final approach to LAX, Jack Castro ’87, M.S. ’91 didn’t need an aviation camp or aerospace museum to spark an interest in flight — he had his backyard. Wide-bodied Boeing 747s and tri-engine DC-10s passed overhead so often that they became the soundtrack of Castro’s childhood. He spent hours outside, binoculars in hand, tracking aircraft as they crossed the sky. On windy Santa Ana days, he sprinted to a nearby field to fly paper airplanes and kites, studying how air pushed against wings and string.

“There were no engineers in my family, and I never met an engineer in my youth,” he said. “But I was always interested in the physics of flight.”

Despite that early fascination, Castro’s path to aerospace and to his current role as a senior technical fellow at Boeing directing structural simulation strategy was anything but linear. With a family legacy in the University of California system, as both his father and sister attended UC Berkeley, applying to a UC campus was a natural choice. During his junior year of high school, however, Castro’s mother passed away. Not wanting to leave his father alone in Los Angeles, he decided UCLA was the only school that made sense. He applied to just one other school, Cal Poly Pomona, and entered UCLA in 1982 with an undeclared major.

By the end of his second year, a counselor told him he had to choose a major. Given his good grades in chemistry, math and physics, mechanical or civil engineering made the most sense. Electrical engineering, his first choice, was full, and aerospace engineering, despite his childhood fascination with flight, felt too risky for stable employment. After weighing his options, Castro chose mechanical engineering because it seemed both interesting and practical.

“The lesson here is that your opportunities will come, but probably not as you envisioned so don’t worry if things do not go as planned,” Jack Castro said. “Instead, be patient and create your opportunities through good performance. Do what you are asked to do and do it well.”

In the summer of 1985, with only a couple of mechanical engineering classes under his belt, Castro struck out trying to land internships at major Southern California aerospace companies — Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed, Northrop and Hughes. None of his applications received a response. Instead, he landed a summer internship at the MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation, a small software company he barely knew, after interviewing with a manager who was a recent UCLA graduate. There, he was introduced to the emerging field of finite element analysis through MSC’s flagship software, MSC Nastran. That detour would ultimately set the trajectory for his career.

Castro continued working part-time at MSC for the remainder of his undergraduate studies and accepted a full-time position as a quality assurance engineer after graduating in 1987, when his applications to aerospace companies again went unanswered. His plan to return to UCLA for a master’s was reinforced when he realized that, while he knew how to use MSC Nastran, he didn’t fully understand the inner workings of the program.

He chose civil engineering not to build buildings or bridges, but because the department offered a flexible, non-thesis path that fit his focus: a mix of dynamics, optimization and mechanics courses.

“Regardless of which department I had chosen, I would have taken the same classes, and it’s those classes that propelled me to the success I have achieved throughout my career,” Castro said.

Two UCLA professors influenced Castro the most. Lucien Schmit Jr., the late civil engineering professor known globally for his work in optimization, served as Castro’s graduate advisor and assigned him a project integrating a new eigenvalue sensitivity method into MSC Nastran — a default feature in the software today. Peretz Friedmann, a professor emeritus of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, taught a structural dynamics course Castro took and was one of the toughest instructors he ever had. Castro said the theoretical foundations he gained in the class became essential to his later collaborations with Boeing engineers.

Despite not receiving a job offer from Boeing immediately after graduating from UCLA, Castro went on to work closely with Boeing engineers throughout his long career at MSC. His deep understanding of Nastran made him an indispensable partner as Boeing scaled its simulation capabilities. In 2012, after more than two decades in software engineering, Castro was hired by Boeing and offered an engineering fellowship. Over the next decade, he advanced from associate technical fellow to technical fellow and ultimately to senior technical fellow.

“While these milestones provide me with recognition, they do not provide me with meaningful feelings of fulfillment as much as my engineering contributions,” Castro said. “One contribution I am most proud of is my role in training the vast majority of engineers across Boeing who have performed loads and dynamics analysis over the past 20 years.”

Castro’s role has also frequently placed him on Boeing’s high-pressure “tiger teams,” rapid-response groups assembled to address urgent technical issues. He said that while the situations can be stressful, they also offer opportunities to work with some of the brightest minds in the company.

Today, Castro is based in the greater Seattle area and leads Boeing’s structural simulation strategy, shaping how and where simulation can most effectively strengthen the company’s competitive advantage. Beyond Boeing, he has spent nearly a decade deeply involved with the National Agency for Finite Element Methods and Standards, or NAFEMS, the international authority on engineering modeling and simulation.

The organization has given him insight far beyond aerospace, helping him understand how new simulation technologies mature and where they can make the greatest real-world impact.

Looking back, Castro says he ended up where he is today because his career did not go as planned and that he entered the aerospace industry through the work he did at MSC. But he doesn’t view that as a negative.

“The lesson here is that your opportunities will come, but probably not as you envisioned so don’t worry if things do not go as planned,” Castro said. “Instead, be patient and create your opportunities through good performance. Do what you are asked to do and do it well.”

Just as important as hard work, Castro stresses, is establishing a fulfilling life and hobbies outside of work. An avid fisherman and competitive soccer player, he is also a proud Bruin who spent four years in the UCLA Bruin Marching Band — a connection, he says, that will always stay with him.