And that’s some achievement. Whatever its appearance, the FanWing is something of a rare event in the aeronautics world: a wholly new technology of flight. The ungainly creature that Peebles, 57, has worked on for much of the past decade combines many of the best features of helicopters and traditional fixed-wing airplanes. It uses far less fuel than a helicopter or a conventional airplane and needs little or no space for takeoff and landing. It is quieter than a helicopter and would cost far less to build and operate. Given a little more time and development money, the FanWing might claim a new niche in aviation: that of a low-cost, slow-moving workhorse of the skies. The potential, at least, is huge. The British government has already coughed up some money to test the vehicle. “My drive to innovation is just a desire to do things differently,” says Peebles. “It’s fun–and this time the fun has spawned something useful.”
The FanWing is certainly different. In a conventional airplane, propellers or jet engines provide only the forward drive, while the movement of the plane’s wings through the air supplies the lift. In the FanWing, spiral rotor blades, which revolve like the blades of an old-fashioned push lawn mower, run the length of each wing. By pushing a big volume of air over the top of the wings, the blades create lift even before the vehicle is moving. They also act as giant propellers, propelling the FanWing forward. “We just grab the air all the way along the front of the wing and give it a push over the top,” says Peebles. The difference doesn’t sound like much, but it makes for a stable ride, little noise and high fuel efficiency. And it doesn’t require the hugely complicated and sensitive mechanical gizmos that go into keeping a helicopter aloft. “Essentially all this needs to fly is a single rotor in each wing,” says Peebles.
What’s more, its peculiar design means the FanWing will never stall: as its speed falls, the lift only declines gently, rather than abruptly as on an airplane. For a conventional aircraft just a tiny shift in the angle of the air hitting the wing has big effects on lift, causing rough flights and sick passengers. But the FanWing, because of the small surface area of its wings, isn’t as vulnerable to heavy winds. Peebles has managed to find an aeronautical solution that’s eluded three generations of engineers out to create their own helicopter-airplane hybrids. “The fact is that it works,” says Mike Graham, head of aeronautics at Imperial College, London, where promising air-tunnel tests were recently completed. “People had often talked about similar techniques, but I had never seen anyone succeed.”
So far Peebles has built radio-controlled models of the FanWing to test his concept but no full-scale prototypes that can carry people. It’s a formidable success for anybody, let alone an inventor with no engineering qualifications. Peebles’s formal education ended with a single semester of anthropology classes. Since then he’s worked as a janitor, bus driver and–until recently–a globe-trotting engineer, servicing kitchens for McDonald’s. But the inventing bug struck early. “Being an inventor was a disease I was born with,” he laments. He’s developed a batch of inventions–an electric fork for twirling spaghetti, an electronic device for frightening moles from a garden and a gadget for displaying a glider’s climb rate and airspeed (Peebles is a skilled glider pilot). For all their ingenuity none has made the big time. The FanWing was on Peebles’s mind for many years. Unlike many inventors, who first develop an idea on the drawing board, Peebles moved swiftly to building prototypes and testing them, refining the design over the years. “My brain just sort of freewheels,” he says. Luck also had something to do with it. His brother-in-law, who’s an academic in London, provided the introduction to Graham at Imperial College.
Peebles’s lack of credentials might account for a lack of enthusiasm among investors. Although he has raised some money through private friends and investors, he reckons he’s done “99.9 percent” of the work on the FanWing. His kitchen doubles as a workshop. To keep his invention under wraps, he conducted early tests of radio-controlled FanWings after dark in a Rome supermarket parking lot, witnessed only by the Peebles family. Now that he has patents on the technology, he runs tests in the fields behind his home.
Peebles readily admits that the FanWing design needs plenty of fine tuning. The history of the aviation industry is rich in failures that started out well. Many promising technologies have foundered because of a shortage of cash or a faulty design. Boeing has spent more than 30 years in vexed efforts to perfect the Osprey, a helicopter hybrid that makes use of tilting rotors. Peebles admits that the FanWing could suffer similar setbacks. Current models, for instance, have little ability to glide–if the engine were to cut out, it would drop like a rock. And he’s still working on how to deal with pesky birds that might fly into the rotors and clog the mechanism.
Nonetheless, Peebles is pressing on. In 2004, he hopes to be marketing an unmanned craft designed as a drone, which will be developed in part with support from the British government. Manned flight will take longer. As Peebles points out, development costs soar when the security of pilots and passengers are involved.
Nonetheless, Peebles talks of a time when fan-powered aircraft could shuttle commuters between airports across city skies, where noise restrictions currently prohibit helicopters. Then again the FanWing might find a future as a crop-duster, a firefighter or an airborne truck. Peebles reckons an ultralight model would creep along at only about 100km per hour–but the latest tests suggest that with a mere 100-horsepower engine the FanWing could lift a 2-ton load, easily beating the helicopter in efficiency. Given such muscle, who cares about good looks?
