The FlyONSPEED team had the good fortune to participate in the 2021 EAA Founder's Innovation Prize Grand Championship, culminating over five year's work on our AOA system and energy display. On Tuesday, 29 July we were selected as one of the top three proposals. We had the honor to share this photo with the other winners: Ihab Awad (Airball) and Mike Foale and his son Ian (Solar Pilot).
The neat thing about our project is that it’s organic. Everyone is a volunteer and contributes as they have time available. I’ve always been amazed at the amount of talent in our community. These are the folks that make up our team:
Lenny Iszak (RV-10)
Christopher Jones (RV-6A)
Cecil Jones (RV-8)
Phil Starbuck
Vern Little (Rocket)
Brian Chesteen (RV-7)
Bob Baggerman
Kacy Anderson (RV-7)
Paul Mantegna (RV-7)
Lt Daniel Rollings (RV-4)
Rob Prior (RV-6)
Nigel Speedy (RV-8)
I’m fortunate to live near Eglin AFB, where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone who has worked in flight test, system development, engineering or aquisition. This list doesn’t include all of the folks who have wandered into the hangar over the past five years and have helped out. Nor does it include our academic advisor, Dr. Dave Rogers, Professor Emeritus, United States Naval Academy, or all of the countless talented folks I’ve been able to network with that have contributed as well. It demonstrates what we can do when the EAB family collaborates. Special thanks to Ed Wischmeyer (PhD) for some hardy debate and helping develop some of our flight test protocol.
I’d also like to thank our hard core initial beta testers: Rob Schroer, Sid Mayeux, and Jeff Vaughn. And when we developed Gen 2, we couldn’t have done that without the help of Gary Sobek and Carlos Rodriguez.
It was awesome to spend Tuesday evening with all five finalists behind the stage--there was excellent conversation and mutual support. We were all there because we genuinely want to reduce loss-of-control potential, and expect the collaboration to continue! What a great group of folks.
Way Ahead
We're looking forward to finishing up the automatic calibration capability for the V3 system and distributing the rest of that hardware to the field for continued testing. We are currently in the preliminary stages of designing the "V4," a variant optimized for production.