Winning with Active Winglets

Nick Guida, Founder and CEO of Tamarack Aerospace, on revolutionising winglets

Q: Nick, let’s begin by looking at how you got started in this business in the first place.

NG: As an aerospace engineer, I worked at a lot of places around the world before founding Tamarack. For many years I held a Designated Engineering Representative (DER) appointment from the Federal Aviation Administration.

My skillsets included being authorised to show compliance in four separate areas of engineering, namely: Structures, Loads, Damage Tolerance, and Fatigue. I was delegated by the FAA to create and review engineering for new and aftermarket aeroplane products, including aftermarket passive winglets.

My experience came from occupying positions of increasing responsibility with several major OEMs including Boeing, Pilatus, Aviat, Eclipse, and Quest Aircraft. I founded my own consulting company in 2004 where I brought my expertise and DER certifications to projects with API, Spectrum, Raytheon, SNC, API, Falcon, Hawker Beech, and others. Tamarack came out of all this, in 2010, based on the invention of the Active Winglet.

Q: So, well before launching Tamarack you had a lot of experience with passive winglets?

NG: Absolutely. What people do not realise sufficiently is that passive winglets put huge stress on an aircraft’s wings and what you end up with is a big compromise between weight and efficiency. You must put additional reinforcing metal into an aircraft’s wings to take the loads imposed by the passive winglets. More weight goes directly to less range, while the winglets themselves lessen drag and improve range. So, you are kind of going around and around in a not very promising circle.

So, I spent a good part of my early career beefing up aircraft wings and/or doing damage tolerance calculations. What I saw quite frequently was a reduction in wing life, that instead of an aircraft’s wing having a 20,000 flight-hour life, as an example, with winglets that came down to 14,000 or so hours because of the stresses on the wing.

By 2009 this was really bugging me as an engineering problem. How do we fix this? A lot of people love the idea of winglets. For a while, I mulled over a cheeky answer. What about inflatable winglets? They would at least be light and would not hurt the wing and the customers could get the looks they want

It’s a huge problem. On a Boeing 767, a winglet could add a thousand additional pounds of structure into the wing. I had the idea of creating a winglet where you could aerodynamically ‘turn off’ the winglet in specific conditions. This would allow you to dump a lot of the additional loading on the wing. So, you could get a substantial increase in the wing’s aspect ratio without the need for wing reinforcement, with all that added weight.

Once I had the idea worked out, my wife and I used all our savings and launched the company. We had our Active Winglet technology certified in 2015 and started selling them. What it meant was a huge increase in range for aircraft that had them installed. An aircraft with a normal flight time of three hours became a four-hour aircraft, capable of doing 1300+ miles rather than 900 miles of a flat wing aircraft on a no-wind day. I have very recently seen a customer of ours flying 1610 nm, which was close to our record of 1853 nm.

Q: What is involved in the installation?

NG: For the current product, we extend the wing by about 2.5 feet on both sides, then we add the winglets. This is very valuable, aerodynamically. It means that the aircraft can climb like crazy, which gets it to its most favourable cruise altitude that much faster.

Remember, every aircraft is a compromise between various goals. The aerodynamicists say: go for really long wings – they’re much more efficient. The structure guy says: no - you’re going to pile on the weight required to keep the wings attached to the fuselage. The stress guy says: the more you go down that road, the heavier you’re making the aircraft.

Now, what we are doing is enabling a profound modification to take place with a major performance boost, with no structural compromises. That is a very good story to take to any aircraft owner.

Read the full article here: https://issuu.com/bizavmedia/docs/bam018_summer_2021/40?fr=sNTJmMTI3NzQ1NDc