Wayne German is a rare prophetic voice whose 15 minute talk at HAWPCON 09 hardly sufficed to reveal his grand AWE visions. Wayne was the successor to no less than Paul McCready & Burt Rutan.at Boeing's old Flight Research Institute. I found Wayne's Tethered Foil paper on the net back on '07 & accepted his generous invitation to move to Portland & collaborate.
Over a two year period KiteLab was founded & confirmed Wayne's key ideas by many successful small scale experiments. For example KiteLab's looping tethered foils are aerodynamically & even operationally in advance of looping wing projects by players like Joby & Makani, thanks to Wayne's concepts. His new DBA is called SoarEn & is a member of KiteLab Group. Hire Wayne to think deeply about your tethered foil & 80xx embedded microcontrollers (Wayne is an Intel processor guru & KiteLab Group has a Silicon Labs founder connection).
Wayne has long identified LLJs as AWE's LHF (low hanging fruit). Why ignore vast energy at low altitudes to chase high-altitude prematurely? LLJs are the bunny-slope of the learning curve to the major Jet Streams. To harvest LLJs Wayne proposes a "Venetian Blind Affair" of kitesail train-loops arcing crosswind driving groundgens. This was hardly the thinking of most HAWPCON attendees who intend sparse flygens in the tropopause on single tethers. At times Wayne was almost hissed for persistently interjecting potent but unpopular ideas. Wayne also surprised the conference by creating an AWE award & bestowing it on Dave Culp, Dave Lang, & me (Dave Lang is still owed a boomerang on-a-pendulum trophy, as Wayne only made two). Being first Mexicano to win "Germy" make me very proud. Note to Wayne- Joe Faust is certainly Germy quality for advocating kite applications since 1964, as founder of KITESA, & is a co-founder of the USHGA, & is central to the emergent AWE movement.
Attached is a JPG of a commonly invisible LLJ boundary intruding inland over Ilwaco, exactly as Wayne had informed me. Kites can be killed by the thin turbulent shear zone, but two kites tethered across such a common boundary can do "free-flight", sustained flight without fuel or conventional soaring conditions; truly a bold New Aviation. Its actual Wynken, Blynken, & Nod tech, as Wayne has for years passionately advocated. |
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