Some teams participating in GoAERO – the global competition to develop a new class of emergency response flying vehicles– draw inspiration for their flyers from such illustrious aviation and aeronautical engineering pioneers as the Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, Henry Farnam, and Louis Bleriot.
Gary Gress, the leader of Team Bivect Air Inc., is no exception. But unlike those other teams, Gary also found
inspiration from an unlikely pop culture source: The M*A*S*H 4077th, the Korean War-era mobile surgical hospital depicted in an award-winning film and TV series.
“When I was working on my GoAERO prototype, I understood that helicopters couldn't satisfy the mission requirements because of their large rotors,” Gary relates. “Yet, I kept seeing in my mind's eye that image of army medics readily tending to the wounded soldiers at the side of the landed Bell 47 helicopter in the opening scene of the M*A*S*H show. Somehow, I thought, patients must be just as accessible in emergency rescue.”
Gary’s thought went from ideation to the development of Ariel, his GoAERO eVTOL aircraft with two propellers arranged in tandem, one in the front of the payload and one behind it. As the 71-year-old resident of a small fishing village off the coast of New Brunswick, Canada, explains: “The propellers can be tilted in any direction for aircraft control in the usual sense. But there is also a gyroscopic aspect that arises which controls roll, much like orbital satellites use control moment gyroscopes (CMGs) to change their orientation, and how two-wheeled cars remain upright even when stopped.”
It seems that this native of Toronto has been thinking about developing such a flyer since childhood. He recalls first using the pieces of cardboard that kept shirts from wrinkling after being dry-cleaned to make planes when he was just four or five years old, “and I’ve never stopped. The hobby grew as I grew. I guess I’ve always wanted to do something in aviation.”
That passion continued to be nurtured in his teen years, when he read every book he could on WWI fighter aces and their planes.
After earning his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto, he worked at Pratt & Whitney in Montreal, in its Turbine Aerodynamics and its Advanced Performance departments. After five years, he returned to Ontario, “for the quite satisfying hands-on position of New Product Development in a non-aerospace manufacturing field, all while continuing to pursue my hobby of building and flying model aircraft. This led to experimenting with VTOL.” Gary recalls, “During my engineering career, when I began to think about VTOL, I did a lot of reading on auto-gyros, helicopter development in the 1930s and 40s, and the numerous, mostly-failed experimental VTOLs of the 50s and 60s intended as an alternative to helicopters.”
This endeavor steadily gained his attention, and after retiring about 13 years ago, he returned to school to complete his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Calgary, with the goal of fully understanding the control of hovering aircraft.
He combined that knowledge and what he learned throughout his engineering career to build a personal flyer, “one that could take off vertically like a helicopter and then fly like a plane,” about a quarter-century ago. But along the way, there were many challenges and, he readily admits, “a lot of failures” – some of which were out of his control. For example, he notes that there were no lithium batteries at that time. And many other technologies that might have helped didn’t exist either.”
The biggest challenge, he says, was how he could make two propellers work side-by-side, while also incorporating wings. Then came the GoFly Prize, the forerunner of GoAERO, and finally, “I found a way for wings and propellers to work together.”
Gary’s work on his GoFly personal flyer led him to enter GoAERO. He says what “really excites” him about GoAERO is that there is now the technology and materials necessary to develop a flying vehicle to get services to where they are needed, and rapidly.
Moreover, GoAERO has helped him to focus better on actual needs, “stripping away my own personal wants and biases,” with the goal of building “a robust and viable, narrow platform that I and others can tailor to various specific applications.”
He cites certain elements as possibly being unique to his six-foot-wide, 16-foot-long Ariel:
- the patient platform fits between the two propellers;
- the flyer will fit in the back of a small trailer, with no assembly or disassembly required;
- it will be ready to take off immediately upon arriving at the scene;
- there will be direct and immediate access to payloads and patient monitoring by ground personnel;
- it will have the ability to remain perfectly level during horizontal flight, and
- it will have the ability to take off and land vertically from extremely inclined surfaces.
Key to enabling this are the propeller-gyroscopes that have the same operating principles as control moment gyroscopes in orbital satellites. Gyroscopes are devices that use the principle of angular momentum to measure or maintain orientation and rotational velocity.
Gary says he will continue to make improvements to his flyer until the GoAERO Stage 3 Final competition because he is a tinkerer at heart. Plus, he understands that as the leader of a one-person team, he will need assistance. He notes that he has already received a lot of help from the GoAERO experts who conduct ongoing webinars for all competitors.
And there is also his design teacher, who was not in the aerospace industry but who taught Gary an invaluable lesson that has spurred him to continue even when he confronts seemingly insurmountable barriers. “He once said to the class: ‘It takes a lot of work to make something simple’,” he remembers. “I think that is so true and it applies everywhere.”
At the end of the day, Gary hopes that his flyer will perform well in the three missions of the GoAERO Prize competition. Possible results, he says, “are that it could help advance us toward viable rescue in difficult-to-access places, and that it will help establish a niche or segment of usefulness and contribution for these aircraft types.”
Lest one think that Gary is spending every waking moment on his flyer, he is apparently an avid reader. A book he read in either grade 5 or 6 titled "Peter Graves: An Extraordinary Adventure!" by William Pene Du Bois (1950, New York, Viking Press) had a “profound and lasting effect on me. It was about a boy of 10 years (my age at the time) who discovered six metal balls - each the size of a baseball - which had the fantastical property of being anti-gravitational. Each ball had a weight of minus 25 pounds, and with them Peter could float in the air or take huge leaps when running. About 11 years ago, I found a used copy of the book online and now have it in my library.”
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