Michelle Rouch

Rouch and her older brother grew up learning to appreciate aviation and while the little sister was not as encouraged to pursue the same educational opportunities as her brother at the time, she did end up following his path and eventually became an aerospace engineer. “Thankfully our parents raised us pretty equally and my brother was a good influence on me and encouraged me to be an engineer like him.” She got her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Wright State University and had her first job at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. “I would say, though, that my real start of my passion for aviation came from my husband, who was an Air Force brat; his father was a pilot in the Greek Air Force.” Rouch has been an artist since she was a little girl, and her mother has kept all her drawings. After a highly successful career in engineering with the U.S. Department of Defense—receiving the Civilian Service Medal—she retired to pursue her art. “One day I was having an artist’s block, and my husband encouraged me to paint an airplane. I enjoy painting portraits and buildings and mathematically and visually adding or merging those subjects together,” she says. “I created the painting of an Albatross at Pima Air and Space Museum with our 5-year-old son walking towards it in a watercolor. That was my first aviation painting, created in 2002, titled Aspiring Pilot. I fell in love with aviation and never looked back.” In addition to painting for museums and individuals, she has illustrated several children’s books, one about Apollo 15 astronaut Alfred Worden and another about Robert “Hoot” Gibson. She’s working on illustrations for a book about the Vietnam-era rescue of Bat 21, which will be published at the end of this year.

I have been very active in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in teaching kids how an airplane can fly, teaching them the four forces of flight, and what aerospace engineers need to consider in designing an airplane. We try to make this a pleasant experience for the kids who go through our AIAA kids club program.”[email protected]

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