Pat Peebles Ready To Stand Aviation World On Its Ear

Pat Peebles has heard it all.

"Is that a harvesting combine?"

"Can that thing cut my grass?"

That "thing" is what Peebles -- the man who invented the rotating fork for eating spaghetti -- calls a "fan wing" aircraft. It has rotors that span almost the entire length of each wing.

"Part of inventing," he told the Independent newspaper in Britain, "is trying to improve things, but it's partly just being bloody-minded and wanting to do things differently. A lot of the things that I've worked on in the past didn't actually work out very well. But the fan wing actually worked out."

So what's a fan wing aircraft all about?

"The genesis of the idea," he told the paper, "was to distribute the flow of air as far as possible over the aircraft. We take that to the extreme, sucking the air in through the front over a rather large area, the whole width of the fan. It compresses the air as it comes through the fan and it gets blown out at very high speed across the wing's trailing edge."

When he dreamed up the fan wing, he had no idea whether it would work. In fact, he didn't know whether somebody else had already invented it.

"Many years ago," he told the Independent, "I worked on a new engine which employed hot air, where air was moved from one section to another and heated and cooled at very high speed."

Peebles built a prototypical model of his fan wing, testing it in the parking lot of a local supermarket. It flew. He tweaked it. It flew better. Then, in 1999, came time to apply for a patent. Suddenly, Peebles found he needed about $36,000 to complete the application process.

"I was ready to quit," Pat told the paper, "because I realized there was no way privately that I could raise that much money, and I wasn't going to put the family into that kind of debt."

But Peebles and his wife decided to "collaborate." They rounded up the necessary money from family and friends and wound up with $1,800 more than they needed. Fan Wing PLC was born, complete with its own web site.

Another lucky break: Peebles met David Nicholas, a former naval architect-turned technology consultant. He advised Peebles to set up a company, name respected engineers to an unpaid board of directors, and gain some credibility. Before they knew it, Peebles and Nicholas had a $85,000 grant from the British government in their pockets.

They used the money to come up with an even better model than the one Peebles developed in that supermarket parking lot.

"It was absolutely fabulous," Pat recalled. "We doubled the efficiency in two weeks of wind tunnel testing. It was very exciting because, being a new device, very small changes can make big changes in the efficiency. People are still trying to tweak conventional aircraft but they're lucky if they get half a per cent, maybe one per cent, change in efficiency. But at this early stage, there was one point where we moved a little section of the wing by 10mm and got a 30 per cent increase in efficiency."

It was remarkable work, according to Nicholas. "An employee of British Aerospace told me that Pat got more out of that �45,000 than British Aerospace would have got out of �4 million."

Nicholas said, when he first saw a laptop video of the flight of an early model of the Fan Wing, "I was blown away by its astonishing performance. It can go very slowly like a helicopter, but it can carry much heavier loads. Pat doesn't like me saying this, but I regard his plane as the fourth great breakthrough in aeronautical science: there was Orville and Wilbur Wright, Sikorski's helicopter, Sidney Camm's jump jet, and Pat Peebles and the fan wing."

"It's quieter than a helicopter of the equivalent weight," Peebles told the Independent. "They've been trying for years to get permission to fly helicopters into Heathrow for commuters out of the bankers' belt, and they never can because they make too much noise. So this could be very useful for connecting for example the five airports around London, a flying bus going maybe 60, 80mph, maybe 100 mph."

FMI: www.fanwing.com