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The Fanwing — and six more of my “Year in Ideas” essays for The New York Times Magazine

Today, the New York Times Magazine has published its fourth annual “Year in Ideas” issue — in which it surveys the most innovative, thought-provoking, and just-plain-weird inventions and trends that defined 2004. I contributed seven essays to the issue, so for posterity’s sake I’m blogging all of them here in seven separate entries. The first one is pretty surreal:

The FanWing

by Clive Thompson

When you first see the FanWing, you think: there’s no way that thing is going to fly. After all, it looks less like an airplane than a big, lumbering combine harvester that has somehow strayed from its wheat field. It has a hollow cylinder where its wings ought to be, and when it trundles down the runway, it moves barely faster than a bicycle. But then it lifts off, angles up and — whoa — soars up into the sky.

”People think it’s a hoax, even when they see it for themselves,” says Patrick Peebles, the inventor. Peebles is a former ice-cream-machine-repair instructor and amateur pilot. About 10 years ago, he had an idea for how to radically redesign the airplane so that it would not use wings. Wings, of course, keep a plane aloft in part because of their curved upper surface, which creates lower air pressure above than below, thereby pushing the plane upward. Peebles envisioned something different: he would replace the wing with a tube filled with blades that rotated like the water wheel on a Mississippi riverboat. If the blades spun fast enough, he reasoned, they would reduce the drag on top, allowing the plane to fly. He spent five years tinkering in his living room until he finally got a tiny model airborne. By this year, he was flying a prototype with a 10-foot span, which he introduced to the public at the Farnborough International Air Show in Britain.

Compared with a traditional airplane, the FanWing can fly at much lower speeds and with much greater stability. It can take off from a relatively small runway and cruise at the leisurely pace of a car. If it ever catches on, the FanWing would make a good air taxi, ferrying people on short hops from city to city, or out to airports. It is more fuel-efficient than a helicopter and potentially safer than a normal plane, since a FanWing cannot stall, no matter how sharply it points up or down. The only real danger is if the fan blades jam and cease spinning — then, Peebles admits, ”it drops like a rock.” Peebles is currently talking to military experts in the United States and Britain about using FanWings as unmanned surveillance vehicles, since they could stay aloft for eight hours on one tank of gas. But whatever the FanWing’s commercial success, Peebles can already claim one singular achievement: he has created one of the few truly new aircraft since the Wright brothers.


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Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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Recent Entries

The “Milky Way Transit Authority” map

Should automobile software be open-sourced?

My Bookforum review of Jaron Lanier’s “You Are Not A Gadget”

Molecular secrets of the “iron-plated snail”

Garry Kasparov, cyborg

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a bunch of stuff

January 31, 2010 » 07:29 PM
V. A. To me death seems to be an evil.
M. What, to those who are al­ready dead? or to those who must die?
A. To both.
M. It is a mis­ery, then, be­cause an evil?
A. Cer­tain­ly.
M. Then those who have al­ready died, and those who have still got to die, are both mis­er­able?
A. So it ap­pears to me.
M. Then all are mis­er­able?
A. Ev­ery one.

January 24, 2010 » 03:22 PM

One of the more interesting trends is family, which came in at number five. Specifically, discussion about family, moms, dads, daughters, etc. jumped during 2009. With Facebook users getting older, this isn’t a big surprise. However, the fact that the mention of “kids” jumped by a factor of five this year is rather dramatic. It’s tough to know what this means, though. (via Facebook Unveils Most-Mentioned Topics of 2009

)

January 15, 2010 » 01:36 PM

BEYOND AWESOME. They are announcing a recall of the Plush Uterus “due to a potential choking hazard for children”. To apply for it, “Please send an email to the address below with the subject line, ‘UTERUS OPT OUT’”.

January 14, 2010 » 10:04 PM

“To order, please TYPE “YES” IN CHECKBOX BELOW TO AGREE YOU UNDERSTAND THIS PLUSH MUST BE KEPT AWAY FROM KIDS (it is a sex organ, after all). If it is not checked, WE WILL NOT SEND THE UTERUS.” (via @ibogost)

January 11, 2010 » 01:45 PM

I watched Space: 1999 back in the day, but I swear to god I do not remember this scene.

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson