Walter R. Fried Memorial Award for Best Paper at PLANS


This newly created award will be presented to the lead author of the best paper. The Walter Fried Award for the Best Paper is comprised of a personalized plaque for the lead author and a financial honorarium of $750 to that same person. The selection criteria includes:  technical content, innovation, importance and timeliness of the subject matter; and conciseness, clarity and completeness of the written material.  The paper must appear in the proceedings and be presented by the lead author who must be present to receive the award at the PLANS Awards Luncheon.  

View PLANS 2004 Walter R. Fried Memorial Award for PLANS 2004 

Walter R. Fried

Walter Fried was born in Vienna, Austria in 1923. He immigrated to the United States at the age of 17 and first resided in Cincinnati, Ohio. During World War II, he served in the U. S. Army in Europe as a translator and interpreter. After the war, Walter earned his engineering degrees at the University of Cincinnati and Ohio State University.

Walter’s first professional job was at Wright Field in the then new field of airborne radar.  His next job was at the General Precision Company in New Jersey where he contributed to the development of multi-beam Doppler radar for navigation system applications. This was followed by an assignment as Chief Scientist for the F-111 avionics at the North American Autonetics Division in California where he was also involved with the beginnings of the GPS program. He then became the Technical Director at Hughes Aircraft for the Relative Navigation portion of the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System (JTIDS).  

In recognition of his professional engineering accomplishments, Walter was elected to be a Fellow in the IEEE in 1981 for contributions and technical leadership in the development of Doppler radar and relative navigation systems. 

During his distinguished career, Walter generously volunteered his time to the IEEE Aerospace Electronics Systems Society (AESS) by serving on the Board of Governors for many years and coordinating the activities of the AESS Technical Panels and the Distinguished Lecturers Program of which he was also a participant. He was the AESS representative on the PLANS Executive Committee since the first conference in 1976 until his death at 75 in 1998.

Walter lectured widely throughout the world on navigation topics and was also well known internationally, for his work as a co-editor of both the 1st and 2nd editions of the important reference book, Avionics Navigation Systems.