Aero Boy

Yet as serious a military vehicle as it is, Raven's lineage harkens straight back to hobbyist aircraft like the Me-109. Raven's creator isn't a defense juggernaut like Boeing or Northrop Grumman; it's a small company whose roots lie in the world's first human-
powered airplanes and solar-powered cars and planes, in flying, flapping pterodactyls and toy model airplanes. For the past 32 years, Aero-Vironment and its founder, Paul MacCready, have pursued energy efficiency and the credo of doing more with less as fervently as big companies have sought utilitarian high performance. And AeroVironment has done it in part by designing vehicles that seem fun and whimsical and anything but practical. The result isn't a faltering shop of mad scientists but a
profitable powerhouse of 220 engineers and scientists whose aircraft have shattered aviation records for more than two decades without letup and have put AeroVironment in the forefront of the rush to create working mini and micro UAVs for the nation's military.



"The human-powered vehicles and the
pterodactyls were learning devices," says Martyn Cowley, a 20-plus-year veteran of Aero-
Vironment. "They had no inherent value, but we immersed ourselves in their technical problems. It's the knowledge we get from them that keeps the company moving in new directions." Or, as MacCready puts it, "If you play with toy airplanes you get expertise in things that are important."





At 77, MacCready still comes to his office in Monrovia, California, every day. He is a slight man with white hair, and today he's dressed in a green wool blazer, a starched button-down shirt, gray slacks and black sneakers. He speaks softly, seriously, and he barely smiles, but there is something disarmingly youthful about him. It's apparent in the way he tends to prop his sneakered feet on the coffee table like a rebellious teenager and in the way his mind darts like a pinball lighting up targets; one moment he's talking about a human exoskeleton that will enable hikers to carry 100-pound backpacks effortlessly, the next about using UAVs to deliver packages in traffic-clogged cities. "Ninety percent of insects use flight at some time in their lives," he says, "so we should too."




Not surprisingly, given his company's trajectory, it was on model airplanes and gliders that Paul MacCready first showed his genius. A scrawny, dyslexic kid who spent long hours contemplating the flight of birds and insects, he broke seven national model airplane records by the time he was 14. At Yale he turned to full-size gliders, buying his first in 1945 for $500. Models and gliders bore an essential similarity in MacCready's mind: Both were expressions of pure flight in which, with a little creativity, he says, "vehicle design leaps ahead as its own reward." In
college, MacCready's soaring mentors challenged him to do "more research and to be quantitative about what I was thinking." It's an approach that has never left him. As would happen throughout his career, the intellectual pursuit of his apparently unproductive youthful passion paid off in concrete and unexpected ways. The shy anti-jock became the world's best soarer, breaking altitude and distance records on his way to winning the National Soaring Championships three times and the internationals in France in 1956. And soaring turned him into a scientist. He received his Ph.D. in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology and then created a company that researched atmospheric turbulence, cloud seeding and weather modification for the U.S. government. Even today, he says, "the dividing line between AeroVironment aviation projects and soaring is blurred. All our projects, from the six-inch UAV to the 247-foot solar aircraft, are based on efficiency, which is the essence of sailplanes and models."