Colonel Howard Sargent, Executive Vice President and Chief Engineer, D-1280X, Inc., is a retired Army Corps of Engineers officer. He was associate professor of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics at West Point, with graduate degrees in engineering from Cal Tech, and business from George Washington University is also an honors graduate of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, the highest Federal management training institute. In the Pentagon, he was senior advisor on management at Army headquarters. Overseas duty included Germany, Korea, Japan, Turkey and Vietnam. He served as chief of the general management staff of a Presidential commission on management improvement. After being one of 32 District Engineers (for Montana, Idaho, and Washington) he became Executive Director (Chief of Staff) at the

Washington headquarters of the Army Corps of Engineers 33,000 person Civil Works Program. Later he was Vice President, corporate planning, for Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. in New York. His book on general management with the subtitle “A Participative Approach to Systematic Management” was published by John Wiley & Sons in 1978.

Colonel Sargent was a key member of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) J1667 committee from 1992 to 2002. Howard played an integral role in designing the procedures, protocols and standards in the development of the SAE J1667 Snap Acceleration test and smoke opacity meter equipment specifications currently used to regulate state heavy-duty vehicle inspection programs throughout the United States. Howard is also an Officer and the Chief Engineer for CalTest Instruments in Wilmington, CA a manufacturer of CalTest SAE J1667 specification Smoke Opacity Meters tested and proven to be the most accurate meter manufactured world-wide.