Aero Boy

Making a tiny airplane fly far and long on little power leads smack to the heart of Aero-Vironment's expertise in doing more with less. Besides Raven and its older brother Pointer, AeroVironment has developed the Black Widow, the world's first 6-inch micro UAV; cannon-fired 10-inch-long UAVs; Dragon Eye, a twin-motor snap-together Raven-like UAV for the U.S. Marine Corps; Martian gliders; and tiny, wing-flapping ornithopters.




"Check this out," says Matt Keennon, a passionate modeler who created the 6-inch Black Widow. He rolls across his cubicle to grab a foot-long battery-powered plastic helicopter connected by a cord to a little controller. "I just got this today," he says. The helo whirs and suddenly it's hovering in the middle of his workshop. "For an off-the-shelf toy, it's really good."




What appear to be dental tools cover his desk, as does a microscope and a fleet of radio-controlled model airplanes. Keennon lands
the helo gently on the carpet and grabs a craft about the same size and shape as a coffee
saucer, a 2-inch propeller on one end, three little vertical stabilizers aft, a camera the size of a pencil eraser peering through a window—the Black Widow. "DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] wanted us to make a 6-inch UAV that weighed only 3 ounces," he says, "but it sounded impossible."




It took five years and $2 million, but Keennon built a plane nearly as light as a feather that flies for 30 minutes while beaming live TV. Like Pointer and Raven, the craft is piloted by a ground-based pilot navigating through a video monitor. "It's just as if you're floating in a balloon," he says. Packed in its tiny innards are a battery, compass, gyroscope, computer, autopilot and a host of sensors. It holds heading, altitude and airspeed automatically. To maximize lift, it's almost all wing. Its propeller, the result of hundreds of hours of computer and wind tunnel work, is nearly as efficient as a full-size one, allowing it to fly long distances while sipping power with the parsimony of a monk. "It was extremely difficult because the avionics didn't exist," Keennon says. "And there was almost no published data on the aerodynamics of such a small plane. But from the human-powered and solar-powered aircraft and pterodactyl, we had a huge amount of
intellectual property. We could never have created it in a vacuum." Still, Black Widow needs work before it can spot al Qaeda guerrillas over the next ridge. "It needs to be more rugged before it's 100 percent reliable," says Keennon, "and it's still too hard to operate."




"But look at this!" he says, scooping up an eight-inch-long thing made from wire and clear plastic. "Our flapping Microbat"—a radio-controlled UAV with bird-like flapping wings for thrust and lift and a conventional rudder for turning, again developed for DARPA to test the viability of
this kind of UAV flight. "As you get small, flapping wings make sense," he says. "A big condor has to run to take off and fly in thermals to stay up. But look at gnats and flies. You see swarms of 'em hanging out in space. They're beating the hell out of the air, but they have no problems staying up and they can do it all day. We achieved 25-minute electrically powered flapping wing flight with this and that's astounding. But," he says, shaking his head and pointing to a dead cicada and butterfly hanging by a thread from the ceiling, "it's still so crude compared to that cicada." He pauses and stares at them for a moment. "For their size and the job they do, they're elegantly perfect," he says, powering up the helo again for a midoffice flight. "I keep 'em up there for inspiration."
Later MacCready and I meet up for lunch, and as we tool down the road in his electric Honda—a gift from the manufacturer—I ask him how he had been able to figure out how to make a human-powered airplane fly when no one else could. "It was only when I was on that vacation and found myself daydreaming and looking at birds that it came to me," he says in the strangely silent car. "After you do it, it just seems so straightforward and you wonder why you never looked at it that way before. But it only made sense when the circumstances gave me an opportunity to look at the problem from a different perspective. And you have to remember, a new perspective can be more important than a new product."

Carl Hoffman, a Washington, D.C.-based freelancer, is the author of Hunting Warbirds: The Obsessive Quest for the Lost Aircraft of World War II.