Aero Boy

Efficient airplanes and cars, batteries and battery packs, miniature electronics and sophisticated flight control mechanisms—MacCready sees them all as part of the same thing, one long continuum dating back to squeezing longer flights out of model airplanes and gliders. "We don't see any difference between aviation and stuff on the ground," he says. "Airplanes, boats, cars—they each move through a fluid, and whether it's on the ground or in the air doesn't matter. But we're the only group I know of who considers them all one entity."

There is only one Paul MacCready, but he has institutionalized himself and his quest for creative thinking
by hiring a shopful of passionate modelers, hang gliders and soarers. He lets them use AeroVironment's offices and shops for whatever they want during off-hours, and then turns them loose on projects that sometimes seem anything but practical. The process generates intellectual capital in uncharted areas, which often can be turned into something practical and profitable. The company's Helios aircraft, a 247-foot solar-powered flying wing weighing a mere 1,577 pounds and developed for NASA, is a direct descendant of gliders and
human- and solar-powered airplanes. The efficient use of solar cells to power its tiny motors; the design of light wings that are stable at slow speeds; aerodynamically efficient propellers—everything that was discovered and refined
on the human-powered and solar-powered
vehicles—found its way into Helios. In 2001, it flew to an altitude of 96,863 feet, breaking the nonrocket-powered altitude record held by the
SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. The craft, equipped with fuel cells for nighttime power, could one day orbit 65,000 feet over a city for six months; AeroVironment sees it as an inexpensive alternative to satellites and has spun off a new company, SkyTower, to market it.




"We're always looking for something that's hard to do and has never been done before," says Bart Hibbs, who joined AeroVironment fresh from Caltech in 1977. Hibbs has 6-inch-long Viking-like copper bracelets on his wrists and an office filled with python skins. "There aren't many other people trying to create solar-powered aircraft," he says, spinning a levitating magnet on his desk. "It's a technical challenge and it keeps you at the edge and it's an easy way to stay away from the competition. And you don't know where it will eventually lead."




Nor is it known when something odd and impractical that AeroVironment has a wealth of experience with might suddenly be in demand, such as Lilliputian unmanned aerial vehicles. Although not unlike sophisticated models in appearance, they are far more complex. The Me-109 flies for 16 minutes and must be controlled within a skilled operator's line of sight. It has neither the range nor the payload to carry cameras or extra fuel or to loiter over a battlefield beyond the next hill. A military micro UAV, on the other hand, has to be small enough and simple enough for one relatively untrained soldier to carry and operate but still have the range to fly for an hour or two carrying a camera, autopilot, GPS, gyro and avionics. But you can't just scale down a big airplane, because the smaller you make it the more inefficient it becomes. The wings on a six-inch Cessna 172, for example, wouldn't provide enough lift to get it airborne, and its propeller would be so inefficient that 50 percent of its power would simply dissipate into thin air.