Ideas: Family-friendly GA aircraft
What sort of airplane would attract the average person?
What is it that nonpilots don’t like about today’s general aviation airplane, and what sort of features would cure those ills? Norman L. Crabill offers some ideas based on current science for a “modern” and family-friendly general aviation airplane. He discussed some of this with AOPA on a hands-free cellphone while driving to the gym for a workout—after work. Nothing unusual about that until you consider that he is 90.
Illustration by Kevin Hand
Crabill is a former NASA lead engineer who also worked for that agency’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Today he is a consultant. In the past he invented the placement of weather displays on GPS maps before GPS maps were in common use, pioneered lightning hardening of airframes and systems—and, oh yes, helped pick all the possible landing sites on the moon to be photographed in advance of the Apollo flights.
At the top of the list is a system to eliminate airsickness based on work he has already completed. He has that system on a model airplane that uses a probe to sense turbulence an instant before the airplane hits it, and counteracts it in advance. Here are his ideas.
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Alton K. Marsh
Freelance journalist
Alton K. Marsh is a former senior editor of AOPA Pilot and is now a freelance journalist specializing in aviation topics.
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