John McGinnis: airplane designer. Visionary or foolish dreamer? You be the judge.
Introduction
John McGinnis from Montana has had a dream for 30 years. His dream is to design and build a better airplane. He believes that his airplane will have perhaps 80% less drag than the typical airplane flying today. If true, it would be a major breakthrough.
Lone Inventor?
John appears to fit the stereotype of the lone inventor. This is the individual that works alone for years and years to make his vision come true. Nobody else believes in him. The experts mock him. His thinking is so far ahead that others cannot even begin to comprehend his theories.
Then one day, his creation comes to life. It delivers on every promise. The inventor is finally vindicated. The world beats a path to his door. Fame and riches soon follow.
Scam Artist?
There is another possibility. The individual in question is a genius all right. But instead of being a technical genius, it turns out that he is really a marketing genius. His enthusiasm and energy are infectious. He attributes to his invention all sorts of nebulous benefits.
When asked for technical details, all that we hear is gibberish. We conclude that it is preposterous for us mere mortals to try and understand his thoughts. All that is left for us to do is to shake our heads in collective wonder.
The need to keep his invention away from his competitors leads to much secrecy. Periodic tantalizing glimpses keep the faithful in the fold. Setback after setback force the postponement of the presentation of the final proof of the concept time after time…
Where does John fit in?
I have watched every video and read every word that I could find about the Synergy airplane. Mr. McGinnis is very big on throwing around obtuse technical terms. Unfortunately, he is also very skittish about going into specific technical details of his airplane design.
In one of the online forums, one of his followers offhandedly comments that “[John McGinnis is] one of the few genuine geniuses in the world.” Alarm bells went off in my head right away. Considering how little evidence John has provided to prove this genius status, I am much more inclined to categorize the statement as the rambling of a “true believer”.
Synergy Aircraft
The Synergy Aircraft website contains almost no information at all, except for a prominent “Donate” button. A few white papers with technical details would have been much appreciated.
A few years ago they built a quarter scale model of their design. I would think that this model would be an excellent platform for proving their theories. Unfortunately, again, the inventor says that the model has sixteen times the drag that the full-size airplane will have. His words, not mine. I have carefully watched it fly around in the videos. To my eyes it flies just like any other model airplane does.
CAFE Challenge
There is another wrinkle to this airplane. The CAFE (Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency) Foundation creates and advances the understanding of personal aircraft technologies through research, analysis, and education.
They conduct annual performance comparison “challenges” of airplanes. For an aircraft company that hopes their flagship product will achieve an 80% reduction in drag, winning a CAFE Challenge would go a long way towards validating their vision.
A key metric used by CAFE is a so-called “person mpg”. It is the traditional miles per gallon measure multiplied by the number of persons in the airplane. There are not too many personal aircraft on the market that can carry five people, like the Synergy airplane does. In fact, if the Synergy team manages to achieve the same fuel efficiency as a single seater airplane, they will automatically get a five-fold boost in their test results. Is that how they plan to achieve their 80% reduction in drag?
Conclusion
My initial plan for this article was to study all the available literature and then write a clear explanation of how this airplane is supposed to achieve its drag reduction. What little solid information I was able to find does not add up, so that was that.
Do not let the controversy surrounding the full-scale prototype keep you from building a scale model. This is an amazing looking airplane, and well-worth effort. In fact, with just a little bit of practice, you too can be spouting off unintelligible technical terms. Imagine the throng of true believers at the RC flying field!
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Questions for John McGinnis, Synergy Designer
Answers from John McGinnis, Synergy Designer
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I did like his comment that there’s no p-effect as the ‘prop has nothing to push against’ LOL
Does he even know what gyroscopic precession even is?
Yeah, that was a funny one.
What is so exasperating is that you always have a doubt at the back of your head, even if just a small one. Could the guy be for real? Could this be the next quantum leap in airplane design? Only time will tell for sure.
This looks a lot like the Ligeti Stratos a 20 year old design from Australia. The joined wing canard style has many design benefits and efficiencies. It looks like this designer has just made a slight cosmetic adjustment by spiriting the top wing and joining it to the bottom the wing via a couple of vertical rudders. If you look at the original Ligeti Stratos it’s clear the
design is structurally better has less wetted area due to the lack of un
needed inboard rudders. Overall looks like a bad coppy of a great aircraft.
That donate button reminds me of the other great genius Moller!
Exactly! I kept thinking of Moller myself.
Thanks for the mention of the Stratos. I’m going to have to do another article on that one!
The comment is made in one of the videos that there are no hinged control surfaces, nor are any visible in any of the photos or videos. How is attitude controlled? The flying model is too far away to see anything, too.
The top of the box wing configuration is a full-flying control surface. In other words, it has a full-flying horizontal stabilizer. The hinges are at the wing tips and at the center section, which is why you cannot see them. Hope that clears it up.
Hi, Carlos, John McGinnis here. No need to shoot from the shadows or hurl cutting insults. I’m always available to anyone who wants to interrogate me on anything they want to know about. My number and email address are public. Please consider this your personal invitation for a detailed and lengthy interview.
Thousands of people who know me personally (or who have flown out to work with me on their own nickel) can vouch for the fact that I am not a scam artist. In fact, if I weren’t so averse to taking advantage of people or risking their money, I’d probably have a lot more of it to spend on this gamble.
It certainly is a gamble, as the things that can shoot it down include far more than my premise or the underlying aerodynamic principles. That is frankly the easy part of this gigantic task. Foolish dreamer? We’ll see, I guess.
The gibberish I spout can be often used to search the source materials deeper, as well as to formulate meaningful public questions to ask. I’m not the last word nor immune to answering poorly, such as when I knew that my interviewer was confused by the interactions of torque, slipstream, guided inflow, precession, and P-factor and I ignored the latter in favor of answering the actual question.
It’s true that we have a Catch-22 situation since the premise involves data that are not fully public, but since I can’t build proof faster than people can talk, all that matters to me is that people conduct themselves honestly with me and with the treatment they would like under reversed circumstances. Your skepticism is fine, but your presentation of it has harmful consequences to me. What have I done to harm you?
I look forward to your call. No guarantees I can help, but I’l try.
John McGinnis
four oh six two fifty twenty-two twenty
Hi. I have to say, I am very surprised by your comment. I tend to assume that us model airplane folks are of no consequence to full-size aviation professionals.
The number one goal of my website is quality information. I found your airplane design fascinating, but I could not in good conscience write about it while ignoring the larger picture. Like I said in the article, I had hoped to write about Synergy’s design principles, but the almost complete lack of solid information prevented me from doing so.
Unfortunately, experiences with other inventors in the past has turned me into a skeptic. I did not want to slam the door on the potential of the design, but I was forced to include a warning in the article.
I believe in the scientific principle, which is founded on open debate and scrutiny of all ideas. Right now, I don’t even know enough about the design to begin to debate it’s ideas. Unless the ideas are made fully public, I’m not sure there is much point to an interview. Do you?
That’s up to you, but as a lifelong modeler, I welcome every opportunity to interact with people who care enough to have an informed opinion. One of the surprises discovered by those of us who have moved into full scale design is actually the contrast between the aerodynamic expertise typical to the model community and the same metric applied to the hyper-conservative and highly constrained full scale aircraft community. Modelers by much greater necessity often REALLY know their stuff…
…with the exception of things that relate to overcoming high Reynolds number challenges. Full scale aviation avoids the problem systematically, but this doesn’t provide a truly efficient solution. That solution is clearly found in the literature, however, and needs to find practical expression.
I have to admit, I liked your latest comment. I’m going to ask the website members what questions they would like for you to answer. That is bound to be an interesting starting point, at least.
Once I have my questions ready, I’ll email them to you. Please reply via email at your convenience. Of course, you would be free to answer questions not on the list. I’ll publish your responses in full on my website. Like all of my articles, my licensing allows easy republishing. The only condition is that I would also be free to express my opinion, as I did in this article. Sounds fair?
Some resources:
http://www.oshkosh365.org/ok365_DiscussionBoardTopic.aspx?id=1235&boardid=147&forumid=175&topicid=3339&page=15
http://youtu.be/GcDIXDRBJis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCqk7HUKMug (Synergy OSH 11 pt1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaVCISch7VU (Synergy OSH 11 pt2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlT4V2r4Oz8 (Synergy OSH 11 pt3)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOdaI4jQ8PA (Synergy OSH 11 pt4)
http://youtu.be/OC0itjCeGAA (synergy Osh 11 pt4B)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAJ9C5570rY (synergy OSH 11 pt5)
Thank you! I may have already looked at these, but I will review them again before writing down my questions.
Hmmm, no, writing another article with your new opinions, good or bad, does not put all the feathers back in the pillow. Searchers will land here indefinitely (as some did and then informed me). This article is inaccurate and derogatory, and the kind thing to do would be to edit and/or replace/expand it to reflect your improved understanding, regardless of where that goes.
Personally, though, if I didn’t “even know enough about the design to begin to debate it’s ideas” I’d avoid slanderous suggestions in print. What goes onto the Internet appears persistent but is effectively permanent, since everything can come back. It is searched by machines that don’t care how you used your words, only what words you used. Your negative tone encouraged negative comments and imply that since you as an ‘expert’ advisor checked it out and found nothing, others shouldn’t bother. I would hope, in exchange for my time on this, that you would ensure that the mindless robot harvesters that troll the blogs looking for topical keywords, such as my project or my name (so they can repeat the content verbatim on fifty different sites) only find a factual, accurate, fair, and well-researched statement of your opinions, with your name in the content for attribution. That sounds a little more fair to me.
Can we stick to facts? What exactly is inaccurate in the article? If you can present me with evidence to the contrary, I’d be more than happy to edit it.
[...] Original “Model This” Synergy article [...]
OK, thanks. That’s all I’d ask. Actually, your intent reads better now (one more question mark would help) but it’s really not my job to squeak whenever people say things. I look forward to seeing if my input on our premise reveals to you why my perspective on this report differs, but even if not I appreciate your response. I’ll send some history soon.
To date, most of our exposure has intentionally been to the enthusiast community, but if and when that changes it will change profoundly. Nosing around your site I see a valuable and knowledgeable resource for the R/C community and it matters greatly to me that leaders are equipped to lead. Thanks for digging a bit deeper.
That sounds great! I think we are finally on the same page. I would love nothing more than to report back to the website members with more details on your fascinating airplane.
Thank you for putting the question marks behind the subheadings! Now it reads like you meant it all along, not like the accusation people thought it was at first. I really appreciate it and look forward to your questions.
You were right – adding question marks made the original meaning clearer.
He has a good idea with the flying wing design. I believe if he would remove the do dad drag producing biplane wing he could improve the performance. Only put things on the airplane that produce thrust and lift.
Neal.
Well, Mr. McGinnis believes this airplane, when built, will have outstanding performance.
Carlos
you write harsh word , right from the beginning
like ¨foolish dreamer ¨ you could cut the ¨foolish¨ we dreamers are just that -period-. No need to throw rocks in his bed .
¨Nobody else believes in him ¨ well I DO , it is very obvious that his R&D is from years of detail work.
´´ Scam Artist ¨ ?? geez ! harsh words for someone that clearly has aeronautical, and managing talent.
¨Lone Inventor ¨ perhaps, but I see all his family back him up …. nothing bad about working alone, I do too !
Any way, good to read John,s replys Happy to know that he authorized me to make some Synergy HL-models some time ago. …they flew.
Read the article again. Given the information available, it’s anybody’s guess as to what John really is. That was my point. Until the design details are all in the open and others can verify the claims, it’s just talk. There’s just not enough there to be able to say he is right or wrong.