Peter Merlin
Peter Merlin accepted an NTT faculty position at SIU Carbondale’s School of Aviation in January after serving as program assistant for Aviation Management and Flight since August 2021.
Born in Hollywood, California, Merlin chose not to follow his parents showbusiness career path after developing an interest in aviation at a very young age. In fact, his earliest memory of airplanes is that of visiting the cockpit of a Varig Airlines DC‑8 at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) when he was just two years old. After earning an undergraduate degree in Aviation Management from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 1987, he spent more than nine years working as a station agent for Skywest Airlines at Burbank Airport and LAX.
Merlin’s golden opportunity came when he was offered a contract position at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. For the next two decades, he worked as a historian and public affairs specialist, as well as supporting NASA education and aviation safety programs. During that time, he authored numerous peer-reviewed research papers and books on aerospace history and technology. He left NASA in 2017 and spent the next three years supporting Air Force flight test and evaluation programs at Edwards. “I mostly helped project engineers write their test plans and final reports,” Merlin said. “These reports provide an unbiased assessment to defense acquisition decision makers and other stakeholders all the way down to warfighters in the field.”
He and his wife, Sarah (an SIU alumnus), left California for Illinois in June 2020. “I spent a year finishing a couple of books,” he explained, “and Sarah got a job as a substitute teacher at Carbondale High School.” After being hired by SIU, Merlin enrolled in the Aviation Management graduate program. He will receive his Master’s degree in December.
A recognized subject matter expert in several fields, Merlin has appeared in more than a dozen film and television documentaries on the History Channel, Discovery, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and others. His interests include Cold War history, space exploration, aviation archaeology, fossils, prehistoric cave paintings and petroglyphs, archaeoastronomy, and the mysterious world of top-secret “black” projects. His most recent book is Dreamland: The Secret History of Area 51.