[1] He was also Chief Scientist for the Federal Aviation Administration, President of the Operations Research Society of America, and an encyclopedia editor.
Its principal work, which involved looking for improved ways of defending the United States against air attack, led to the ground-breaking book, "System Engineering," co-authored with Harry H.
Machol served as secretary, and later 1971 as president of the Operations Research Society of America and was honored with that organization's George E. Kimball Medal in 1992.
Machol's work involved a number of strands — aviation,[6] scientific writing, systems engineering,[3] chemistry,[7] applying Operations Research to sports,[8] computing,[9] and mushrooms[10] — that intertwined over the years.
The pilot's union was concerned with safety issues — in particular, potential mid-air collisions of bunched planes — over portions of the North Atlantic that were not covered by radar.
Early in his tenure at the FAA, he researched potential dangers to small aircraft created by wake turbulence from the Boeing 757.
[11] The Wall Street Journal has credited Machol with laying the foundation for a subsequent revolution in data-based NFL play-calling.
[12] With his student, former Bears and Bengals quarterback Virgil Carter, he wrote and supervised multiple peer-reviewed articles in the 1970's demonstrating that analytics-based decisions were often more successful than traditional intuitive actions.