Flight Unseen
Sketches show some of the variations that Blaine Rawdon ’73 considered
for Boeing’s Blended Wing Body design, shown in its final form in a computer
illustration. |
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For the Pelican to go from paper to plane, Rawdon will have to
not only overcome a number of technical issues, but also find a market large
enough to justify the enormous expense of producing a new airplane. To that end,
he’s thinking
not only of military applications, but also of commercial cargo business. Today,
a company wishing to ship its goods overseas has to send them either by container
ship, which is very slow but very cheap, or by jet, which is very fast but very
expensive. The Pelican could offer a third option that would be much faster than
a ship and considerably cheaper than other planes. It could carry 178 of the
20-foot-long containers used to carry cargo on freighters and tractor trailers.
It also has the fuel efficiencies that come from the ground effect. Because it
usually flies at such a low altitude, there would be no need to pressurize the
plane, except for the cockpit. And its relatively slow speed means it would not
need the precise finish and
expensive manufacturing of high-speed jets. While the Pelican could be expected
to capture only a modest percentage of the existing freight market, that market
is so huge that even a small share translates into a great deal of money. And
with China’s rapidly increasing role as a producer and consumer nation,
the overseas shipping market is becoming even more lucrative. In the past two
years alone, shipping companies have tripled the day-rates for their freighters
as a result of increased demand for transportation to and from China. Rawdon
believes the Pelican could be a tool for economic development in struggling countries.
Because it would transport the standard containers used on trucks and ships worldwide,
the plane might make it economically feasible for a country in central Africa,
for example, to become a freight hub for an entire region by building a freight
terminal and runway for the Pelican.
Rawdon may be designing the world’s biggest airplane, but he got into the
business by working with the world’s smallest airplanes. When he was growing
up in California, a friend’s father had a model airplane, the kind with
a gasoline engine and wires attached to the body so a hobbyist could fly the
plane in circles while holding onto the wires. Rawdon would fly the plane with
his friends, and he soon became
entirely consumed by flying. Even though he built the plastic model planes that
are almost a requirement for young boys, he says he didn’t have much interest
in them because they
didn’t do anything. It was flight itself that attracted him, and he pursued
it with ever-increasing ambition. The wire-controlled planes eventually gave
way to radio-controlled models, then kits that let Rawdon build his own planes.
He finally began developing his own designs for model planes; it’s something
he still does, and he offers his own design software through
a small Website. He is part of a subculture that is distinctive and somewhat
hidden, but surprisingly large. The Academy of Model Aeronautics alone claims
170,000 dues-paying members in the U.S., and there are far more in other countries.
The models have an enormous range, says Rawdon: “Model airplanes range
in weight from .05 ounces to 55 pounds, which is a nominal limit, but guys are
flying turbojet radio-controlled models that go 200 miles an hour. I mean honest-to-god
turbojets. And they go 200 miles an hour. Then there are guys flying radio-controlled
models indoors at three miles an hour.”
Because the people involved in this hobby tend to be technologically inclined
and iconoclastic, a lot of innovation goes on here. It is far easier to experiment
with a new propeller type or wing construction method when you can fabricate
it, test it, repair any damage from failure and try it all again in the space
of a week. For full-size airplanes, that process is long and very expensive.
Model plane designers are so sophisticated, in fact, that the aerospace industry
looks to them for
solutions to design problems. “A lot of that technology is working its
way down into the aerospace business,” Rawdon says, “both in research
stuff and also in the unmanned aerial vehicles—the weapons and reconnaissance
vehicles.” One aerospace company even goes out of its way to hire model-plane
designers and lets them use the company’s equipment for their model work,
simply because it’s likely to produce some innovation the company can use.
Despite Rawdon’s passion for flying, he wasn’t considering a career
in aviation when he came to Amherst. He chose Amherst because his father (Blaine
Neahr Rawdon ’46) had gone to the college. (His two younger brothers, Matthew ’79
and Robert ’77, are also alums.) “Otherwise,” he says, “it’s
unlikely that someone going to high school on the West Coast is going to hear
of Amherst. I think I was possibly the only person to go to a private liberal
arts college from my entire high school.” When he got to Amherst he chose
physics as his major because he had been particularly inspired by his high school
physics instructor. But he found Amherst to be quite a bit more challenging than
high school. “Writing on the chalk board was too slow for the professor
in that first class,” he says. “He used an overhead projector with
a scrolling roll of clear plastic, so he would write by hand and then turn the
crank. It was all you could do to keep up in class. Fortunately, I was able to
go back and absorb it, so I hung in there, but I was not a great physics student.
Some time ago I saw a book about graduate physics topics that somebody had in
their house, and I thought, ‘This would be interesting.’ But I looked
through it and I thought, ‘Oh my god, there’s so much I don’t
know it isn’t even funny.’”
Although Rawdon certainly uses physics in his job, much of his work is diplomatic,
explaining his planes to potential customers and to colleagues at Boeing. There,
he says, his liberal arts education really pays off. “It turns out that
I know many things and take many things for granted that a lot of other people
don’t know,” he says, “and that’s sort of surprising.
It all seems natural to me. One of the most useful things I learned was the ability
to talk and write, which is the result of numerous classes, many of which were
painful to me. Professor Armour Craig [’37] got a couple of fundamental
ideas across, including that the use of language can be quite rigorous and precise;
that by forcing ourselves to use language in a rigorous way, we force ourselves
to think in a rigorous way.”
After Amherst, Rawdon went to the University of Southern California to get a
degree in architecture. He worked for his father’s architecture firm for
a few years, but his interest in model planes never waned. As a result, in 1977
he found himself involved in the project that changed his life.
He started spending weekends working with Paul MacCready, a fellow model-plane
enthusiast and founder of AeroVironment, an environmental and wind-power
consulting company. MacCready was trying to win a prize that a British industrialist
had established for the first person to produce
a human-powered airplane able to fly around a designated course. People using
modified conventional planes had been trying unsuccessfully to win the prize
for 18 years. MacCready’s plane, called the Gossamer Condor, was a unique,
super-lightweight design constructed of aluminum tubing, Mylar plastic and piano
wire, powered by a pilot pedaling a
bicycle linkage that turned the propeller. Rawdon’s job was to test-fly
and repair the airplane as it went through its final iterations. On August 23,
1977, the plane successfully flew the 1.15-mile course, winning the prize. The
whole project was documented in a PBS television show, and the plane itself is
now on permanent display in the Smithsonian Institution.
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