DESIGNING AND BUILDING ARMORED VEHICLES

If you're an engineer, it doesn't get much cooler than this.

Bobby Heninger, a 1977 graduate in electrical engineering technology from Old Dominion University's Batten College of Engineering and Technology, was at the mall with his family, preparing for a post-retirement family trip to Hawaii. His cell phone rang. It was an official from private military subcontractor Blackwater, now Xe Services. The man on the phone had received Heninger's name from former colleagues at Ford and Volvo, the latter from which Heninger had just retired after 25 years.

A few months later, Heninger found himself in charge of a team of 12. Their job was to produce the "Grizzly," an eight- or 10-passenger armored vehicle capable of driving at high speeds through a variety of terrain, and withstand blasts from improvised explosive devices.

"It was quite an experience," said Heninger, whose team was disbanded 26 months ago, after Blackwater tried and failed to get a U.S. government contract to produce armored vehicles. He's now the director of manufacturing at Wartsila, a military subcontractor in Chesapeake, remanufacturing high-tech items such as propellers for U.S. Navy ships and submarines. Ultimately, the team - which included many of Heninger's former co-workers from Ford and Volvo - produced 39 of the vehicles, six of which are in operation around the world.

Heninger said his experience at Old Dominion in the 1970s, where his curriculum mandated that he take courses from other disciplines, and where faculty members encouraged crosscollaboration, has been invaluable throughout his career, including when set about making the armored vehicle.

"The different classes engineering students have to take discipline them to appreciate and think of all the issues that a project will have to face," Heninger said. But he thirsted for more tools to use in his career.

"So while my friends took easy classes for electives, I took engineering classes. This made me have to open my mind to a different set of problems when doing a project," Heninger said. "To be a good engineer you must be open and design for change. The different classes in the various disciplines helped that."