FanWing: a new way to fly

Special Reports
Credit: FanWing/Adrian Mann.
FanWing: a new way to fly
A short-take-off airplane that can lift heavy cargos with ease. It sounds like
a dream come true for airlines, yet the price of making such a vehicle is that
it looks ‘a bit funny’. FanWing is a new way to fly, in which the whole wing is
turned into the engine. This is the story of the development and testing of what
once seemed like a pipe dream but has now become a project funded by EU
money, and led by DLR, the German Space and Aerospace Research Centre.
I
n the year 2000, writer, scientist and
prophet, Sir Arthur C. Clarke sent a fax to an
unknown inventor who had created an odd
and innovative aircraft wing. Clarke
complimented the inventor, Pat Peebles, and
included a quotation from Clarke’s own ‘Laws’: Every
new and revolutionary idea goes through four
stages, which may be summed up by the following
reactions:
1. What a stupid idea! Don’t waste my time.
2. Well, there may be something in it - but it’s not
useful for anything
3. I said it was a good idea all along
4. I thought of it first
An artist’s impression
of a FanWing dusting
crops.
The letter was a reassurance, a prediction and a
warning. The quote was to become what Peebles
calls ‘a sort of template’ for his own experience
as he continued to take the project forward to
commercialisation.
What a stupid idea
The FanWing company was officially incorporated
in 1999. However, the story of the new wing had
begun several years before. Peebles, a lifetime hobby
tinkerer with an eclectic history of odd inventions,
had long nursed a private dream of creating a new
kind of rotor-powered flight. There were already
experiments worldwide within his area of interest.
Dikla Peebles
is a director of
FanWing Ltd.
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Special Reports
Money was
short but
private
letters and
emails from
international
figures in the
aerospace
world
represented a
form of moral
capital.
Pat Peebles at the SOAR
wind tunnel, von Karman
Institute.
68 ROOM
Some of the aircraft took off but it seemed from
the records that nothing sustained flight. Peebles
thought he was as well qualified as any other
eccentric inventor with a dream, and decided to have
a try himself.
He appeared to be the classic crazy night-time
inventor with a non-flying flying machine and a
day job. Then, his so-far 100% failure rate led finally
to a test on a disused country road. Watched by
family, a friend with a camera and two stray dogs,
Peebles turned on the remote control for his latest
experiment. And this time the little workshop
prototype, maybe more resembling a mini grass
cutter than an aircraft, took off and flew for a few
seconds. Not an impressively long flight perhaps but
it was a crucial turning point. For those few seconds
of flight were the first proof of concept of what the
New York Times would later describe as ‘one of the
few truly new aircraft since the Wright Brothers’.
The innovation is apparently quite simple. It
incorporates a system of fan blades within the wing.
The aircraft has a normal fuselage and a motor that
powers the rotors, which are contained within the
open wings. The rotors take in air in front and eject
it behind. Peebles’ goal was to spread the propulsion
as far over the wing as possible. He had tried every
kind of variation and finally this one not only worked
but seemed, according to patent searches, to be new.
Acceleration of the air over the wing results in both
short take-off and heavy lift capability.
The media were the first to take up the story,
along with a group of friends and family who covered
initial patent costs for the newly-formed FanWing
company. Establishment response was more
sceptical and Peebles now thinks that he was naive in
assuming that a new way to fly would be exciting to
everyone. He hadn’t taken into account how arrogant
the whole thing would appear. The aircraft looks odd
and amateurish, and the provenance was, as Peebles
says himself, ‘a self-educated nobody from nowhere.’
He realises now that from the outside it would
have been almost impossible to take the invention
seriously. However, background professional support
did start to consolidate.
Money was short but private letters and emails
from international figures in the aerospace world
represented a form of moral capital. Then in 1998
one establishment figure provided a new turning
point for the invention.
Turning point
Professor JMR Graham, then Head of Unsteady
Aeronautics at Imperial College, London, asked
Peebles to authorise his own departmental use of the
wing as the basis for a graduate thesis because as he
said, “Many have tried but this one worked.” There
followed a series of three graduate papers each
based on studies of the early model wing Peebles
lent to the college.
Credibility grew. A Royal Aeronautical Society
UK branch invited the company to present a guest
lecture attended by the Society’s Chief Executive.
Professor David Nicholas, UK Government advisor
and dedicated defender of inventors, championed
the company, and FanWing Ltd. won three grants.
The BBC and Discovery Channel filmed the aircraft,
Newsweek picked up the story in a major spread
and the company, maybe with more bravura than
experience, set up its wares at Farnborough Airshow.
Professional as well as media and investment
interest took off, raised further by Peebles winning
second prize in the International Saatchi & Saatchi
‘World Changing Ideas’ Award. The New York Times
listed it in 2004 as one of the year’s best inventions.
A journalist from the Royal Aeronautical Society’s
journal, now its editor, wrote a detailed analysis of
the whole project, comparing it favourably to the
helicopter and entitled it: “Revolution in the Air”.
Interest was added by the fast-growing general
commercial interest in the then new unmanned
aircraft market. UAVs/drones seemed particularly
suited to the FanWing technology. Peebles was
approached for discussion of ‘potential collaboration’
in turn by Boeing, British Aerospace, and Lockheed
Martin. The Hungarian Government Defence
University lectured on the technology and a Swiss
company offered partnership.
The Russian version of the magazine Popular
Mechanics ran a long article and Gazprom emailed
for more information. A several-day meeting
in China resulted in an invitation to set up a
Special Reports
Credit: FanWing/Adrian Mann.
An artist’s impression
of a FanWing cargo
carrier.
development programme, and the company was
invited to meetings with both Arab and Israeli
organisations. However, despite all the overtures, the
company was struggling.
Unable to afford professional management,
it passed due diligence but was amateurish in
presentation, and the technology was still neither
professionally tested nor documented. Additionally
off-putting, the company was basically a husbandand-wife partnership, with one other US director
- or as a major organisation put it, ‘a mom-and-pop
garage outfit’. One leading UK aerospace assessment
company later fatally summed up the FanWing
for one top-level investment negotiation: “It looks
funny.” Crucially, while the Imperial College papers
had maybe conferred professional credibility on the
invention they had also removed it. For one of their
academic conclusions claimed that the aircraft, while
taking off almost immediately and with a heavy load
capability, would never hit more than bicycle speed.
The FanWing had now it seemed reached the
second stage originally described by Clarke: It may
be interesting but it’s not useful for anything.
Cherish your gains
However, Peebles was learning to cherish his gains.
It was after all, he said: ‘a new way to fly. That
couldn’t be all bad’. The company had attracted
private investors in several countries and a talented
aerospace artist for projected images. There was a
growing team of strong commercial representatives.
There was less obvious support too. A national UK
newspaper and some top-level aerospace experts
had expressed public or private excitement with the
invention and a growing impatience with the UK,
which they said seemed about to continue its record
of losing major inventions.
And there were other pluses. Patents issued
internationally had proved that the FanWing was
unique. There were proven advantages in its almost
instant take-off and landing on unprepared ground,
fuel efficiency, heavy lift, manoeuvrable operation
and no stall. Potential commercial applications
ranged from security surveillance, disaster aid,
minesweeping and fire watch to crop dusting and
cargo lifting. The company possessed filmed proof of
concept in the form of a series of successfully scaled
flying model prototypes. And it had the invaluable
and ongoing interest of a group of top-level
journalists both in and out of the aerospace world.
Nevertheless, it was increasingly obvious now
that in order to gain any further backing, the
company needed not only better management and
presentation: professional testing and academic
analysis were more and more obviously the only
way to breach the walls of the established aerospace
world. As Sikorsky designer and former vice
president of research Ken Rosen succinctly put it to
Peebles: ‘You need the science.’
The project went into decline. The company had
to survive on mainly free labour and the generosity
of their long-suffering investors. But there was
nothing left after patent and basic running costs
to cover the level of management, PR, and the
professional documentation that was badly needed
to attract more investment. It was Catch-22.
However, there were good surprises as well as
setbacks. The next turning point was an approach
by a UK engineer. George Seyfang had formerly
been responsible for assessment of New Concepts
for BAE Systems and was part of the team that had
previously rejected the FanWing. He had taken
Info
Information about the EU
SOAR project will be available at the DLR stand at the
Paris Air Show. They will also
present a workshop/seminar
on the project from 3-5pm,
Wednesday 17 June. The
DLR stand is Statique B8,
Hall 2C, C357.
ROOM 69
early retirement and was now engaged in what he
called ‘hobby’ projects and he suggested to Peebles
an experiment. He saw the FanWing as particularly
suited to the ‘Outboard Horizontal Stabiliser’
concept - OHS is based on observation of flocks of
migrating birds where each bird in the V formation
receives lift from the wing tip of the bird in front.
The suggestion was what Peebles calls a lightbulb
moment. He was already booked to fly his original
model at the 2010 Farnborough Airshow and met
Seyfang there. Immediately after the demonstration
he made a first flying experiment with the new
concept. The potential improvement in efficiency
was immediate and obvious.
Seyfang re-investigated the basic technology. As a
professional sceptic with over forty years’ experience
of assessment of major aircraft, he tunnel-tested
the wing independently over several months. He
concluded this time round that the FanWing had a
convincing commercial future, specifically in shorthaul heavy-lifting cargo transport. He and Peebles
set up an informal technical partnership to develop
the new twin-tailed FanWing.
Still ‘looked funny’
It was still a workshop development Seyfang called
a hobby project and it still ‘looked funny’. However,
Seyfang had brought to the company a new level
of credibility and technical input. He was also now
publicly presenting at international conferences
his own conviction that the FanWing would with
the right development present advantages in speed
(the previous bicycle prediction had been long
disproved), heavy-lift, forward flight efficiency and
in lower noise output that would challenge the
helicopter.
Credit FanWing.
Special Reports
The first flight of the
first FanWing model.
He concluded
this time
round that the
FanWing had
a convincing
commercial
future,
specifically
in shorthaul heavylifting cargo
transport.
The chronology of FanWing
1995/6 Earliest tests use swinging-arm rig for original wing design as ‘paddle wheel’ in the wing
slot. Cross-flow fan rotor inserted
1997 First proof of concept flight of 2m model
1997 Wind tunnel loaned by the University of Rome
1998 Model loaned to Imperial College London as basis for eventual three M.Eng theses
2001 Construction of small in-house wind tunnel
2002 UK funds company tests at Imperial College wind-tunnel with variable wing shape model.
Efficiency improved from 20G/W to 30G/W of lift
2004 20 kg flying model exhibited in looped video at Farnborough
2005 New vectored-thrust model uses simple balance and manual tethering system to measure
vertical thrust. Horizontal flight tests completed
2008 First public UAV flight demonstration, Wales. On-board data logger measures speed, altitude, climb rate, rotor RPM, engine temperature and control surface deflection
2010 Farnborough public flight. Twin tail OHS concept tested, >10% improvement in efficiency
2013 Large static wing section built, 60cm diameter rotor 200cm span
2013 SOAR project started in collaboration with DLR, VKI, University of Saarland. Wind-tunnel
model tested at VKI, 50cm diameter; rotor 150cm span
2015 EU SOAR project ongoing
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Then in 2013 via the European Union, the ‘science’
suddenly started to arrive as a full package. Peebles
had been producing promising efficiency results
with Seyfang on a newly upscaled static wing when
he was unexpectedly invited by a leading Russian
aerospace professional to attend a meeting in
Brussels. The discussion included a potential and
small addition of the FanWing technology to a
large European group project. Following Peebles’
presentation, an American research engineer at
a German university, among others, approached
him for more information. Finally a group of three
organisations together with the FanWing company
then presented to the EU a new proposal described
neutrally as ‘an Open-Fan Wing Concept’. Several
months later the team’s project SOAR won a twoyear research award. And that’s where the company
stands now.
Fanwing’s future
The project is led by DLR, the German Space and
Aerospace Research Centre; the team has conducted
preliminary wind-tunnel tests and computational
fluid dynamics simulations at the Belgian von
Karman Institute, and the University of Saarland led
by engineer Chris May has provided the wing motor
and actuation mechanisms.
Test results are yet to be fully assessed and
documented. Peebles says: “It’s open ended and
we’re not sure yet where we’re headed, whether
towards upscaled cargo lifters or smaller drones.
But for the first time the technology is being
investigated, documented and finally being taken
seriously by some of the world’s top research
organisations.”
From a small ‘funny looking’ model taking off in the
middle of nowhere to an EU-funded team enterprise,
Clarke’s Law may yet still apply, but there is no doubt
that the concept has taken a major step forward.