COLUMN ONE : Aerospace Careers in Low Orbit : U.S. Asians constitute a growing share of the engineers in an industry vital to the nation’s technological leadership. But many say cultural bias and stereotypes block their rise to top management.

After a 30-year engineering career, Don Tang reached a corporate pinnacle this year when he was named chief of Lockheed’s top secret military spacecraft unit in Sunnyvale--one of the most sensitive jobs in the U.S. defense industry.

The son of Chinese grocers thus became the highest ranking Asian-American at a major Pentagon contractor, ostensibly demonstrating that the industry’s barriers against those of his ethnic background had finally broken down.

But that is not quite how Tang sees it. Despite his success, Tang believes that Asian-American scientists and engineers face a glass ceiling--able to advance in their careers, but only up to a limit.

Though the public’s view of the industry is shaped by such personalities as test pilot Chuck Yeager or atomic bomb designer Edward Teller, crusty men of European descent, Asian-Americans have emerged as an intellectual pillar of U.S. aerospace. And their importance is sure to increase.

At Hughes Aircraft, they make up 24% of the technical staff--widely regarded as one of the best in American manufacturing. At TRW’s space and defense sector in Redondo Beach, they make up 20% of the science and engineering staff.

It is estimated that half of all new aerospace engineers in the next several years, at least in California, will be Asian-Americans or recent Asian immigrants. At some corporate laboratories around Los Angeles, particularly in such areas as microwave transmission and computer software, they constitute a majority.

Although Asian-American professionals seldom file discrimination complaints or grumble to their corporate management, many regard themselves as targets of cultural bias and racial stereotyping, in which they are presumed to be good engineers and scientists but poor business managers and executives, according to internal studies undertaken by several major defense contractors.

The same studies also show that the Asian-Americans doing the industry’s technological grunt work are not being promoted to management--especially top management--in proportion to their numbers. Not surprisingly, turnover of Asian-Americans is disproportionately high as they seek opportunities elsewhere.

Unless U.S. aerospace firms can ensure that their brightest people are promoted to top management, their technological competitiveness could be threatened. At worst, top Asian-American graduates may not pursue aerospace careers and immigrants may return home to take advantage of burgeoning opportunities in Asia.

“Hughes is trying to deal with these problems,” said David Barclay, Hughes vice president for work force diversity. “We are viewing this as a business issue. We believe that this is going to make us more competitive.”

The U.S. aerospace industry, with a rough-edged culture largely borrowed from the military customers it serves, has been slow to adapt. Some companies appear to be ignoring the issue.

Only in the past decade has the industry admitted large numbers of Italian-Americans, Jews and other ethnic groups to its top ranks. The integration of even more engineers of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese and Indian heritage may be a tougher challenge.

“They think Asian engineers can only do good work in technical areas,” said S. Phillip Oyoung, chairman of the Society of Chinese American Aerospace Engineers and a middle manager at Allied-Signal Aerospace in Torrance. “But think about who are the best managers in the world today? Many of them are Asians. It is a loss for both sides because industry is limited from getting all the brainpower that is available.”

American firms seldom allow their Asian-American employees, particularly recent immigrants, to help establish business ties to Asia. Individuals in Oyoung’s organization have close links to quickly expanding Taiwanese aerospace ventures, but few employers have attempted to tap the resource.

“In many cases, aerospace companies put people in Asia who don’t speak the language or know the culture when they have people in their company who understand the business climate there and the culture,” said David Friedman, a Los Angeles attorney who authored a report on the Japanese aerospace industry for the National Bureau of Economic Standards.

A relative handful of Asian-American professionals, such as Lockheed’s Tang, have reached the top ranks of major firms, but none is a chief executive. In laboratories at the bottom of the management chain, Asian-Americans are sometimes severely underrepresented.

An internal study undertaken for Hughes Aircraft by UCLA professor William Ouchi found that while Asians account for 24% of Hughes’ technical staff, they make up only 5% of the managers in those areas.

At TRW, Asian-Americans make up 20% of the firm’s aerospace engineering and science staff, but just 11% of the managers, a company spokesman said.

At Northrop, 10.5% of its engineering and science staff is Asian-American, but figures were not available for managers in those fields, a spokesman said. Asian-Americans make up 5.7% of all Northrop employees, but 3% of its managers companywide.

Rockwell International would only say that 15.7% of its technical staff is Asian. Aerospace Corp. said its technical and professional staff is 13.8% Asian-American. McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed declined to provide data.

Over the next decade, this ethnic group will grow even more critical to the industry. While immigration from Asia appears to be tapering off, large numbers of Asian students continue to pursue advanced degrees here and remain afterward.

“There is no doubt that the bulk of engineering and technical brainpower in the world is going to come from Asia in the next century--China, Taiwan, India and even Japan, though they are going to fade off,” said Joel Kotkin, an international fellow at Pepperdine University. “A lot of these countries produce a huge surplus of scientists and engineers and they offer a huge opportunity to those corporations that can integrate them.”

After Asian immigrants plant roots here, their children also are attracted to technological careers.

At UCLA’s School of Engineering, Asian-American students--dominated by those of Chinese origin--represented 49% of the 1991 undergraduate freshman class, while whites made up 33%. At UC Berkeley’s School of Engineering, Asian-American students account for 50% of the freshman class.

U.S. aerospace has benefited from the contributions of Asian-Americans.

Howard T. Ozaki, a Hughes Aircraft scientist who retired this year, pioneered early amplifiers that were critical to his firm’s dominance of the military radar business, said Theodore W.J. Wong, a Hughes senior vice president. David Huang, a former Rockwell International engineer, is credited with helping pioneer experimental rocket engines. Fred Tsay, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist, theorized first that moon sand was formed by solar wind bombardment.

Despite such accomplishments, many Asian-Americans hold “unspoken grudges” about perceived discrimination.

The Ouchi study highlights a chasm between the views of Asian-American managers and white counterparts. “I didn’t know that there was a problem,” one white executive said. “Here in Southern California, Asians are very integrated and I don’t really notice a difference.”

But the Asian-American managers had very different responses. “There is an Asian-Pacific problem at Hughes,” said one.

“When we Asians come to work, we work. We do our eight hours work, we are not wasting time . . . but then we are shortchanged. How come you didn’t tell us you were going to downgrade us for our accent. . . . We have a problem,” said another.

For years, many white executives judged Asian-Americans as meek, lacking communications skills and having mediocre leadership qualities.

White managers “know they need us technically, but they treat us like staff in the Army,” said Oyoung, the president of the Chinese-American aerospace society. “You do all the work and give them the options.”

Many Asian-Americans say white executives do not fully appreciate traditional Asian values of building consensus, hard work, team playing and commitment to education.

Clearly, there are wide differences among Asian-Americans. People who were born here and whose families have been here for generations are less likely to feel thwarted by a cultural divide. Recent immigrants face cultural as well as language barriers.

Some Asian-Americans say they are their own worst enemy for failing to speak out and fighting for their due.

“They don’t want to be in the same class as blacks, so they create different terms like glass ceiling or stereotyping,” said Vincent Maximilian-Yee, a Korean-American. “The whole civil rights movement would not have gone anywhere without blacks. Asians have benefited from the struggle blacks made. And yet, we do not want to be any part of it.”

Maximilian-Yee, a Hughes administrator, was fired in 1985 but won reinstatement after a federal judge ruled that he was the victim of racial discrimination when a supervisor misrepresented his employment history in discharging him.

The fight did not end there. Maximilian-Yee, a Cornell University graduate, contends that he has been denied promotions and was rebuffed in raising the discrimination issue with Hughes executives.

“I need to finish this unfinished agenda,” Maximilian-Yee said. “When you get fired, whether it is your fault or not, it is a terrible disgrace in an Oriental family. I didn’t feel the judgment compensated me.”

This year, Maximilian-Yee filed another discrimination complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Maximilian-Yee is clearly an exception. Although many Asian-American engineers complained in interviews with The Times about bias, few were willing to be quoted. Official discrimination complaints to government agencies or courts are rarely filed.

“Frankly, I can hardly recall one,” said Robert Corlett, vice president for human resources at Lockheed.

While Corlett said Lockheed has a good record of promoting Asian-Americans, he acknowledged that the company might be doing “something different” if it faced more complaints.

“In general, the Asian people are more passive and are reluctant to make waves,” said Tang, the Lockheed executive in Sunnyvale, noting that he also blames American societal barriers.

But for many Asian-Americans, being more assertive also means forsaking some personal values.

As children, many Asian-Americans are “taught they should only speak when they have something important to say,” said J.D. Hokoyama, executive director of Leadership Education for Asian Pacifics, which puts on seminars through UCLA for aerospace executives. “Wouldn’t business meetings be much shorter if everybody followed that rule?”

In some cases, barriers facing Asian-American workers are not so subtle. Some engineers have been denied top security clearances because they have relatives in China or North Korea--leaving their careers handicapped. Questions about loyalty to America evoke the most bitter feelings.

“If you look at all the security breaches, they are all Anglo people who did it,” said Oyoung, head of the Chinese-American aerospace society.

Perhaps belatedly, many aerospace firms are admitting to a problem and are trying to change. Hughes’ Barclay acknowledged that the firm has a glass ceiling in some areas, though he argues it is not uniform across the company and does not stem from racism.

“When a manager says there is no problem, that is a problem,” Barclay said. “If they don’t recognize it as a problem, then it is going to be difficult to fix it. If I have my way, we are going to develop a competitive advantage because of this diversity.”

To help Asian-Americans break through to top-level jobs, Hughes, along with other aerospace firms, participates in the UCLA program for Asian-American managers. It also sponsors courses within the company, including special classes to help foreign-born Asian-Americans reduce their accent--a sensitive issue among immigrants.

But executives at other aerospace companies do not see a problem needing a fix. Among them is Jorge Diaz, a Mexican immigrant who is deputy program manager for Northrop’s B-2 bomber operations and one of the highest ranking Latinos in aerospace.

“On the B-2, I have a director for low observables technology (stealth) that is Japanese, a subsystems director that is Hispanic, an electronics director that is Chinese, and a manager for design of the low observables that is black,” he said. “These are very important jobs.”

Citing his own Mexican accent, Diaz said that he has not been discriminated against because of it and he dismisses the notion that accents result in bias against any other ethnic group. “I have a Lithuanian engineer with the same problem,” he said.

Aside from perceived discrimination, some Asian-Americans and more recent immigrants are being lured away from the aerospace industry by unique opportunities.

This year, Kwang-I Yu, one of TRW’s most promising young Asian-American scientists, left the firm to start his own electronics firm in Pasadena, Paracel Inc., to produce a fast data searching system--a technology he pioneered for TRW.

Yu did not feel limited at TRW by discrimination--in fact, he is getting financial support from TRW--but he can now quickly establish links with Asian firms, using his understanding of the cultures there and contacts through Asian-American networks here.

“Asian-Americans are forming their own companies and linking up,” he said. “It is happening more and more.”

Taiwan is trying to woo back scientists and engineers, offering generous salaries and vast capital for new ventures. Former Asian-American TRW researcher Peter Tai and former Aerospace Corp. researcher Frank Wong are developing Taiwan’s satellite program, said Phillip Chen, president of the Chinese Engineering and Scientists Assn. of Southern California.

Yaw-Nan Chen, director of Taiwan’s science division at its Los Angeles diplomatic mission, said that an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 Taiwanese scientists and engineers with advanced degrees have returned home in the past three years. The vast majority were newly graduated students, but in past years 90% of those people elected to pursue careers in the United States.

Aerospace layoffs and rising wages in Taiwan are important factors in the exodus, Chen said, but exasperation among highly educated Taiwanese is also a problem.

“Most of them can get high-level jobs in Taiwan,” Chen said. “They have some kind of frustration that they do not have an equal chance here.”