Every new system arrived fuzzy. Hutson brought each one into focus for 35 years

The stars got bigger, not clearer.

Through a cheap plastic Tasco telescope in the San Fernando Valley in the early 1970s, the moon and stars turned into what Mike Hutson remembers as "big white fuzzy blobs."

He couldn't see much. It didn't matter.

"But still, it was fascinating," Hutson said.

Some things still arrive fuzzy. He's gotten used to it.

Since 2023, Hutson has been the chief architect for the Point Mugu Sea Range Department at Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division. He's building the Sea Range's Advanced Live, Virtual and Constructive lab and also driving its expansion by connecting it to other ranges.

"ALVC is a completely different realm that I wasn't familiar with," Hutson admitted.

But this isn't anything new to Hutson. He's been figuring out new things since 1991.

Thirty-five years.

"Long time," Hutson said.

For Hutson, long time started with a job that was ending and a place he knew "zero" about.

After graduating from UCLA in 1986, Hutson worked for a small defense subcontractor and found out it was going under in late 1990. A job fair at California State University, Northridge, put Pacific Missile Test Center in front of him.

In March 1991, Hutson reported to Point Mugu as a junior professional and an F-14 avionics flight test engineer. His clearance hadn't come through yet.

Before the flight briefs and control rooms, he sat in radar classes and read unclassified documents.

Then the base introduced itself.

"There's F-14s taking off and F-18s, A-6s, F-4s," Hutson said. "And I thought, oh my gosh, what have I done? This is amazing."

Before he fully understood the work, he could feel it.

"I love the noise and the vibration that you feel physically when an aircraft is taking off right next to you," Hutson said. "It's amazing. I like knowing its mission, its role in our defense, in our military, and having a hand in that."

The place he knew nothing about started making sense.

"This was gonna make my career, helping the country, supporting the warfighter," Hutson said. "That sunk in real early."

Soon, he was shadowing a senior engineer through flight briefs, control rooms and live aircraft data.

The awe came first. The responsibility came fast.

A year or two in, Hutson was running one of his first test events when the pre-mission system checks started coming back wrong. One check led to another, and the results kept coming back bad.

The radar transmitter was bad. Someone had to call it.

Hutson did.

The aircrew was ready to fly. The money was already spent. The call was his.

"Am I doing it right?" Hutson said. "Am I working through the process right and making the right call? It was. But it was still scary."

That was the kind of call John Tang had been preparing him to make.

Tang was Hutson's first chief engineer, the kind who sent test plans back covered in red marks because the control room was the place to find mistakes, not the cockpit.

"Tough. Very tough," Hutson said.

And the lesson stuck.

"You don't want the pilot to find the problem," Hutson said. "That's not when you want them to discover something's not working."

Tang taught more than red marks. Data mattered. The method of test mattered.

"Only data can tell," Hutson learned. "Data is data."

From Tang and others early in his career, Hutson also learned how to keep focus through Base Realignment and Closure rounds, the reduction in force and the uncertainty that came with
both.

"Control what you can control and you have to adapt," Hutson said.

By the turn of the century, the work had gotten closer to wartime need.

Hutson was the F-14D lead test engineer, and the aircraft needed software to employ the Joint Direct Attack Munition, a kit that turned regular bombs into guided ones.

And the squadrons needed it fast.

In February 2003, a military-civilian team boarded USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71) in Puerto Rico before meeting USS Constellation (CV 64) and USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) in the Persian Gulf.

"I had two cats and two traps," Hutson said. Two catapult launches. Two arrested landings on the way back. "So cool."

Across 17 days of ready-room briefings, hangar software upgrades and pilot briefings, they modified 30 F-14Ds.

Then on March 1, 2003, the 17 days turned into combat capability.

An F-14D from Fighter Squadron (VF) 2, the Bounty Hunters, dropped the first operational JDAM.

Across the 99-day combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, VF-2, VF-31 and VF-213 flew 2,547 combined sorties.

VF-213 completed 100% of its assigned sorties and put more than 550,000 pounds of ordnance on target.

Hutson's software flew on those aircraft.

Early in a career, the work can feel small: a piece of software, a system, a test plan covered in red ink.

The work was bigger than it looked. What started fuzzy had come into focus.

"When you first start, it's hard for you to visualize it in the greater scope and scheme of things," Hutson said. "It impacts our defense and safety of air crew and our mission."

The next problem was not what the aircraft carried. It was what could find it.

From 2003 to 2009, Hutson led test engineering for Tactical Aircraft Electronic Warfare, integrating self-protect jammers, dispensers and countermeasures suites onto F/A-18s, F-14Ds and rotary-wing aircraft.

Hutson knew flight test. Electronic warfare was a new picture entirely.

"They didn't really have a test team per se," Hutson said. "They did a lot of testing in lab, but they didn't know how to integrate lab testing and platform testing as well."

While he was deep in platform testing, another program widened the frame.

On Nov. 29, 2007, Hutson graduated from the Senior Executive Management Development Program, the precursor to today's NAVAIR Leadership Development Program. The program changed how he saw the work.

"It gave us that larger picture," Hutson explained. "How all the other system commands work and integrate together."

Then the work flipped sides.

In 2009, Hutson moved from the demand side of test and evaluation to the supply side. He joined the Sea Range supporting Missile Defense Agency events.
The scale was different now. Not one aircraft. Not one squadron. Events stretched from Vandenberg, California, to Kwajalein Atoll, to Kodiak, Alaska.

By 2018, Hutson had taken over as the Trident missile program test manager, running West Coast tests of the submarine-launched D5 missile.

"Very stressful," Hutson said. "It was a big program. A lot of cats to herd. Stressed to make sure I didn't forget anything."

In September 2019, USS Nebraska (SSBN 739) launched four missiles during Commander's Evaluation Test 2. And in February 2020, USS Maine (SSBN 741) launched two during Demonstration and Shakedown Operation 30.

"Seeing the very first one come up and everything come together was very much relief," Hutson said. "Very exciting."

After Trident, the assignment widened again.

From 2020 to 2023, Hutson was chief engineer for the Sea Range Operations Division. In 2023, the Sea Range hit a record 365 main events.

By then, the lessons Tang had drilled into him had become part of how others saw him.

"Mike is the John Wooden of our engineering team," said Andrew Tree, chief engineer at the Point Mugu Sea Range, comparing Hutson to the legendary UCLA basketball coach who won 10 NCAA championships and built teams around fundamentals. "A quiet, brilliant leader who always focuses on the fundamentals."

Today, Hutson is standing up the Sea Range's ALVC lab and helping move the range into digital engineering and model-based system engineering.

And the tools changed on him. Again.

"Old guys like me, that's pretty foreign," Hutson said. "I learned engineering skills using paper, pen, calculators, documents and spreadsheets."

He kept learning them.

"It's scary at first," Hutson said. "Everything's scary at first. But then you start getting into it and learning it."

Some things he doesn't have to figure out alone.

Hutson met his wife, Annie, at China Lake in the early 2010s. She was a contract specialist. He was a contracting officer's representative. She moved to Point Mugu in 2013.

They camp. They hike. They go to UCLA games.

"Whether he's attending football games at the Rose Bowl or basketball games at Pauley Pavilion, his loyalty as a fan is unmatched," Tree said.

On the right kind of night, Hutson points a camera at the same sky he stared at as a kid. The Orion Nebula, photographed from his Simi Valley backyard. Clearer than the kid with the Tasco ever got it.F

"I've improved a great deal since that first Tasco," Hutson said.

After work, Hutson and Annie commute home together. Retirement comes up, too.

After 35 years, the hard part isn't another new role, another unfamiliar system or another fuzzy picture he has to stay with until it comes into focus.

He's done that before.

F-14. Tactical Aircraft Electronic Warfare. Trident. ALVC.

What will be hard is leaving.

"I know I'm doing the right job in the right place," Hutson said.