I like this twitter posting from Marc Mac Lean.

Ecotourism: fly 12 hours in a large aircraft and then worry about whether your hotel washes your sheets once a day or once a week.

— Mark Mac Lean (@marktmaclean) April 24, 2013

Mark makes a great point. A person flying in a commercial airliner for 12 hours will cause the release of 1 to 2 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) whereas washing towels only once a week instead of daily saves only about 5 pounds of CO2.

Levopters can help to bring these two statistics closer together by greatly reducing or entirely eliminating the carbon emissions from flying. A commercial airliner will travel about 6,000 miles in 12 hours and the same trip in a levopter would take about about 96 hours (4 days). That is three and a half days longer than the trip by aircraft and many people may not want to take the time to travel by levopter but there could be some advantages to the levopter flight that the jet airplane can’t offer.

Levopters could make a vacation as much about getting to a destination as it is about being at a destination.

Spacious accommodation

A jet aircraft has to fly at very high altitudes in order to achieve efficient operation and the need to fly high means a jet’s fuselage needs to be pressurized to keep people from dying of oxygen deprivation. To make the fuselage strong enough to withstand pressurization, the fuselage of a jet aircraft is built as a long, slender aluminum tube with seats packed as tightly as possible. A levopter, on the other hand, flies at low altitudes and doesn’t need a pressurized fuselage. That means it doesn’t need to be a long slender tube but can be more expansive to provide comfort for passengers equivalent to what they would experience on a train or a cruise ship. Instead of eating and sleeping in their seats, passengers can eat in a dining room and sleep in beds.

Direct route

Usually, a trip to a remote ecotourism site will require multiple flight legs and possibly even several hours spent in a tour bus to finally reach the desired destination. A levopter does not require a formal airport with paved runways and with fewer passengers than a commercial airliner, a single levopter could make a trip specifically for a particular destination. You could board the levopter in your home country and travel in comfort all the way to the final destination never having to transit airports or travel the final miles to your destination by road.

Better scenery

Jet aircraft have small windows to withstand the pressurization whereas a levopter can have large windows to enjoy the scenery along the way. Coupled with that, the levopter will be flying at low altitudes so the windows will provide spectacular panoramas close enough to the ground to actually see what is below.

Entertainment and socializing

Inflight entertainment on an airliner consists of movies on overhead TVs or if you are lucky, you’ll have a seat with a small video monitor mounted in the seat in front of you. On a levopter, these facilities can be extended to cover the range of activities normally found on cruise ships and because of the spaciousness of a levopter, people will be able to socialize, interact with and learn from each other as they travel.

No greenhouse gases

Finally, the most significant difference between traveling by jet airplane or levopter will be the fact that a levopter will not release any CO2 or other green house gases into our atmosphere.

There is a worldwide movement referred to as the “locavore” or “local food” movement. Locavore people strive to buy food that is produced close to where they live. One of the benefits of purchasing locally grown food is that the food travels less far so less fuel is used to transport the food and that means fewer green house gases are emitted to transport the food – so buying locally produced food is a good thing. Right?

Maybe not from everyone’s perspective. At least not when viewed through the eyes of some of the world’s poorest people. At odds with a movement to shun food produced in far away lands is a situation typified by Bolivia. Bolivia is the poorest country in South America ¹. Consider that the average income in Bolivia is about $900/person per year and that 40% of the labor force is engaged in agriculture ² and it becomes obvious that Bolivian farmers are probably not in favor of people avoiding the consumption of their crops.

Photo courtesy of Alter Eco Foods

So what is more important? Should we limit green house gas emissions by purchasing locally grown food or should we buy crops from poor people in places like Bolivia to allow them to work themselves out of poverty?

Levopters offer a solution to this dilemma. Levopters are wind powered aircraft that fly without using any fuel. Using levopters, agricultural producers in remote countries like Bolivia will be able to transport their crops to overseas markets without emitting any green house gases. A farmer living in Bolivia will be able to transport crops to Chicago or any other place in North America without incurring the cost of fuel and since levopters use no fuel they also produce no green house gas.

The levopter will fly in virtually a straight line at a speed of 50 to 80 miles per hour to make the 4,000 mile trip in about 3 days or less.

A 3 day transit time is far shorter than if the corn crop

• went by truck or train to a seaport
• where it was transferred to a ship
• the ship then traveled in a non-straight line at a speed of less than 20 miles per hour to a destination seaport
• where it would again be transferred to a truck or train to
• finally travel to Chicago.

A Bolivian farmer will realize benefits of cutting out costly middlemen and high transportation costs to sell crops at markets that are far more lucrative. Locavores will have access to fresh food with a low carbon footprint. Both sides win.

There are millions of farmers and small producers around the world in similar situations to the farmers of Bolivia and levopters offer the promise of helping these struggling people to improve their way of life.

This is a concept design for a small levopter that could potentially be used by farmers and small manufacturers. It is configured to carry 1,800 to 2,000 pounds of cargo plus one or two passengers. The range of such a craft is really limited more by the requirements of the passengers than the craft itself because as with all levopters, there is no need for fuel. The flight time from Uganda to France, for example, would be about 3 days. Shorter flights would also be advantageous such as Uganda to Mombasa taking only about 10 hours. Typically, truck journeys from Uganda to Mombasa take almost a week.

Whether the levopter flies near or far, it opens up the opportunity for small producers to seek out and deliver their goods to places where they can get a fair price for the hard work they put into whatever they produce.

We anticipate this vehicle can be built at a cost of less than $7,000. That compares very well with the purchase price of a new pickup truck that has a similar payload capability. Nevertheless, the cost won’t be trivial for many of Africa’s impoverished people so possibly this smaller levopter might be shared amongst villages or other groups of people. Because levopters are simpler to build than conventional pickup trucks, it is very likely that levopters will be locally produced in Africa as opposed to imported from producers in far off lands thereby keeping more hard earned cash in Africa.

These small levopters will not only facilitate the transport of produced goods but they will also open up the possibility for producers to bring back needed goods to their farms, factories and villages. Farmers could bring back fertilizer and farming tools, while a factory owner might bring back new machines to improve his factory.

Hopefully, levopters will contribute to helping start a new cycle of incremental improvements in the lives of African people.

We have started the process of moving some of our development efforts to Africa. This has been under consideration for months and the initial phase of the move is to identify localities and partners for development work. Some of the issues that argue in favor of locating development efforts to Sub-Saharan Africa are:

1. Sub-Saharan Africa needs transportation improvements.
2. Get end user input as early as possible.
3. African resources are sufficient for development.
4. African geography suits levopter testing.

Sub-Saharan Africa needs transportation improvements. My previous blog entry pointed out that while the people of Sub-Saharan Africa are the poorest in the world, they have to pay twice as much for road transport as do people in the United States and Europe. This stifles the ability of farmers and other producers in Sub-Saharan Africa to get the best price for their goods. In his book From Poverty to Power, OXFAM’s Duncan Green points out that “Farmers must take prices offered by visiting buyers because they have no transportation of their own. If they rent a truck, the police demand bribes at every roadblock on the way into town.” Levopters will allow farmers not only to circumvent road blocks but also to reach markets that may pay much higher prices for their produce than the market in the closest town.

Get end user input as early as possible. Although listed second, this is the primary driver for carrying out development in Africa. Too many well-intentioned efforts to produce a product go astray because the development of the product is driven by engineers and designers without enough understanding of end users and how such end users will actually use the new product or without appreciating the cultural idiosyncrasies of the people in an intended market.

As an example, the company General Mills researched the Japanese baked goods market and found that Japanese people frequently bought cakes at retail outlets but didn’t cook cakes at home because their kitchens typically didn’t have an oven. Accordingly, General Mills developed a cake mix that could be prepared in a rice cooker, a ubiquitous Japanese appliance, and sent container loads of their cake mix to Japan only to have their new product fail in the Japanese market. Follow up research revealed that Japanese housewives were reluctant to use their rice cooker for anything apart from cooking rice for fear of tainting the flavor of their rice.

In a similar vein, I once attended a presentation given by an American agronomist who had toured developing countries to instruct people in methods to increase yields from their agricultural plots. He had met with a group of farmers and one of the subjects he spoke about pertained to techniques to prevent mice from gaining access to stored grain. He asked if there were any questions and one of the farmers inquired, “If we do these things to keep the mice from getting to the grain, what will the mice eat?”.

These simple examples illustrate the need to involve end users as early as possible in a product’s design process and if the poverty constrained people of Sub-Saharan Africa are to be early users of levopters then it is imperative to get their input, ideas and cultural preferences incorporated into the initial designs of levopters. We feel this can be accomplished through partnering with one or more universities in Sub-Saharan Africa, to work with the professors and students who are indigenous to the areas where levopters will be used. In this regard, we have started to establish criteria to gauge universities by. Some of the best universities in Sub-Saharan Africa are in the country of South Africa but from an African perspective, South Africa is not one of the more transportationally challenged countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. So one criterion is to look for universities in countries where levopters can most greatly benefit the people of those countries. South Africa has a good network of highways and well developed sea ports whereas 17 of Africa’s 54 countries have no direct access to the oceans at all. For example, trucks traveling from land-locked Uganda typically wait 5 to 10 days simply to cross the border into Kenya in order to access the sea port in Mombasa.

Another consideration for selection of universities to work with will be their ethnic and gender equality policies. Ethnic divisions often permeate African societies, politics and university enrollment bias. Similarly, although it is estimated that women own one third of all informal businesses in Africa¹ and they comprise roughly 70% of agricultural workers² they account for only about 38% of university enrollment³. If levopters are to be successfully used in Africa it is imperative that we understand the needs of marginalized people so that levopters are developed with those people’s needs in mind. Consequently, it is important that those marginalized people, be they women or disadvantaged ethnic groups, are represented in the make up of a university’s student body.

African resources are sufficient for development. Critical components of levopters are the flexible wings they use and the super-strong tethers that attach the sails to the fuselage. These items may be high-tech in their own right but their use and control is relatively well understood and should be a manageable task within African universities. Another development effort will be to create a detailed database of the directions and speeds of winds at increasing altitudes above the African continent and stemming from the creation of that database will be the requirement to provide software for extracting that information and modeling the operation of levopters in the winds above Africa. Should the resources of a university we work with prove lacking in resources for activities such as wind tunnel testing or CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) analysis it is likely that the university in question has a partner relationship with a university in the developed world that could fill such a gap.

African geography suits levopter testing. Lastly, it is important to locate certain aspects of development within reasonable proximity of suitable flight testing areas. Heretofore, testing has been carried out in the sparsely inhabited open spaces of the American prairie bounded by the Pawnee National Grassland. A quick review of the African landscape has highlighted many areas that have a topography similar to that of the American prairie.

Moving development efforts to Africa will undoubtedly pose challenges but the anticipated rewards for the people of Africa far outweigh the potential hurdles that may present themselves.

1 http://members.weforum.org/pdf/gcr/africa/1.4.pdf

2 http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/egm/gst_2010/Wakhungu-EP.2-EGM-ST.pdf

3 http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Pages/women-higher-education.aspx

In sub-Saharan Africa, prices for transportation are higher than anywhere else on Earth. A 2008 report* showed transport prices in countries such as Chad and Cameroon to be almost twice as high as in the USA and Western Europe yet the quality of the transportation services in these African areas is only about 1/3rd that of the developed regions.

Added to this disparity of poor quality for high price is the fact that the people living in these areas are among the poorest people on Earth, many surviving on less than $2 per day.

Putting it another way, people in desperate need of transportation in order to improve their life’s circumstances are confronted with virtually insurmountable obstacles when it comes to exporting products that they produce, importing products they need and generally moving around from one place to another in their region. It is little wonder that it is so difficult for sub-Saharan people to break the poverty cycle.

This video shows just one of the many challenges to moving goods and people in Africa.

Video courtesy of Giorgio Trombatore.

Another challenge comes not from Mother Nature but from greedy humans who extort truckers and other travelers with illegal roadblocks.

Photo courtesy Father Mar, Trinity Afer.

Fifteen of Africa’s 47 countries are landlocked with no access to an ocean. Goods to and from those countries need to cross borders and often need to be transshipped. Transshipment and border processing delays dramatically add to transportation costs.

Levopters can help solve many of the transportation problems of sub-Saharan Africa.

• They can leap-frog impassable roads.
• In the 2008 report, 40% of vehicle operating costs were for fuel and lubricants. Levopters use no fuel, hence they can remove that 40% of vehicle operating costs.
• Levopters also leap-frog borders to circumvent transshipping and border delays.

Levopters will be less expensive to produce than trucks and because the technology employed by levopters is reasonably simple, it is quite feasible that they can be constructed in Africa thereby avoiding the importation costs associated with trucks while at the same time creating a new industry for Africa.

The challenges in Africa are many but we hope to help confront some of those challenges with Levopters.

* Transport prices and costs in Africa : a review of the main international corridors / by Supee Teravaninthorn, Gaël Raballand. (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank.)

To get a feeling for how a family and community in Africa could benefit from levopters, read the vivid and inspiring story created by J. Brandon.

Eduardo (Ed) Samuel Aduna has contributed a fascinating analysis of the transportation challenges in Southeast Asia. He accompanies his analysis with a view of how levopters can overcome many of those challenges to improve the way of life for people in that region.

Read Ed’s levopter scenario here.

Essentially, the goal of Wind Powered Aircraft is to create sailboats that sail through the sky.

Instead of having a keel in the water and a sail in the air, a levopter positions its keel at a lower altitude where the wind is less strong and positions its sail at a higher altitude where the wind is stronger.

Watch this short animation to get the idea. For a more technical description, click here.

Esprit, Sam and I got through hurricane Sandy in great shape. When we returned to the Atlantic City marina, Esprit was tied-up as we left her and apart from some rain water that came through the forward hatch, she was dry and undamaged. We got back to Esprit on Thursday, the first of November, a day before most other boat owners because when we evacuated we took our bikes. The police were more tolerant of bikes versus cars on the roads so we were able to return to the marina when cars were still forbidden to go to Atlantic City. We evacuated by taxi but we returned before taxis were permitted to make the trip to Atlantic City so we un-evacuated on bikes. Sam took most of the gear we had brought with us.

Sam Un-evacuating by Bike

We spoke with the coast guard officials at Atlantic City to see if there was any significant silting of the harbor entrance that could inhibit our exit. They didn’t know for sure but they advised that another significant storm, a nor’easter, was scheduled to make landfall in about a week’s time. We balanced the risk of sailing through a harbor entrance with unknown depth against the prospect of being in the path of another storm and decided to set sail the next day to get as far South as we could before this next storm hit. Turns out there was quite a bit of silting but with our 3.5 foot draft, we got through the passage that was down to about 4.5 feet of depth. A foot to spare was all we needed.

It might sound risky to chance an unknown passage but it really depends on several factors. One is the type of sea bottom beneath the boat. Mud or sand is much more forgiving than a coral reef and we knew that we had the former versus the latter. Other factors are high winds, large swells, breaking waves near by or strong currents. These can all exacerbate a simple grounding. Finally, the speed of the boat can determine how hard it goes aground.

If a small boat such as Esprit grounds in mud or sand and if the boat is not going too fast, it is often a simple matter of putting the engine into reverse and waiting for the rising and following of passing swells to allow the boat to back off of the low point. If stuck harder, a technique is to carry an anchor out in a dinghy in a direction away from the grounding, drop the anchor, then use a winch on board the boat to pull the boat toward the anchor and off of the grounding point. We took it slowly, monitoring our depth sounder as we went and in the end, we didn’t have any problems.

Years ago, at a port in the Mediterranean, things did not turn out so satisfactorily. A beautiful 55 foot sailboat grounded as it came into the harbor. It was 10 pm and the sailboat had about 50 people aboard returning from an evening cruise. The grounding was into sand and there was no immediate damage to the boat but there were sizable swells that were incrementally lifting the boat and moving it toward the beach. We used our inflatable Zodiac dinghy to take many of the party goers off of the sailboat because the water depth was to shallow for a responding police boat to negotiate. The distance from the stranded boat to a breakwater was only about 75 feet so each trip with five or six people was made in short time. We also used the Zodiac to run a line from the sailboat to be made fast to the breakwater.

Fortunately, the tide was coming in. The rope to the breakwater stopped the boat from being moved by the swells toward the beach. We were able to slowly winch the boat toward the breakwater as the tide lifted it off of the sand. After about three hours, we got the boat off the ground. The boat was floating and was held by the rope to the breakwater. The job was almost done but to everyone’s horror, one of the party guests on the breakwater thought that the mission was fully accomplished and blithely untied the restraining rope before the skipper of the stricken boat could get the engine started. The next few swells that hit the boat, lifted it and carried it toward the beach. We attempted to repeat our efforts of the previous hours but with no success. In the end, the sailboat was destroyed as it was beat upon by waves crashing on it as it lay in shallow water.

After leaving Atlantic City, we made the passage down the Atlantic coasts of New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and arrived at the harbor at Norfolk, Virginia yesterday evening, the fifth of November. After anchoring for the night in Willoughby Bay, this morning we departed for the Atlantic portion of the Intra-Coastal Waterway (ICW). Not many people realize it but it is possible to take a boat from New Jersey down the Atlantic coast, around Florida, along the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Corpus Christi, Texas and never be in the open ocean. This is possible because of the ICW. It is a series of interconnected natural waterways and canals that permit shallow draft boats to negotiate a distance of over 3,000 miles from New Jersey to Texas.

We have never traveled the ICW so it will be a new experience for us.

Today, we only made about 20 miles from Norfolk to the top of the ICW because there was quite a bit of traffic from naval ships, commercial ships, waiting for draw bridges to open and to transit a lock at Great Bridge, Virginia. This afternoon we tied up just North of the Great Bridge Bridge (not a typo) and we are monitoring the reports about the inbound nor’easter. Predictions are for winds of only 18 mph for tomorrow for our current location whereas Atlantic City is getting predictions of 38 mph with gusts to 50. It seems the advice of the Atlantic City Coast Guard people has served us well.

Tomorrow and Thursday, we will see what the nor’easter has to offer, but we don’t expect much except a bit of rain and moderate winds. We will continue our progress toward warmer Southern waters.

I want to say thank you to Jim, an Absecon Policeman and Mark and Jim, Absecon volunteer firemen. Along with the driver of the truck, they evacuated Sam and me and about 15 others from an area that was significantly exposed to hurricane Sandy. Later, a policewoman from Absecon drove us from the firehouse to look for a motel room. She was also friendly and very patient as she took us from place to place trying to find a motel with a room available.

The actions of the owner-manager of the motel we were evacuated from stand in less high regard in my assessment. I won’t mention names because of legal ramifications but it was the opinion of at least one law enforcement official we have spoken with that the motel manager knew his motel was in an evacuation zone and he shouldn’t have taken us in or more importantly the families with small children. Some of the people in the bed of the evacuation truck were clearly terrified. 

It is about noon here in Absecon. The wind is moderate and there is light rain. We never lost electricity at the motel where we are currently staying. We have heard from Mike and John of the sailboat Pura Vida that they have spoken with the harbor master at the Marina and the “H” dock where Pura Vida and Esprit are berthed seems to have withstood Sandy reasonably well. We can expect some dents and scratches but apparently all of the “H” dock boats are still on top of the water. That is wonderful news.

We have tried to call Toni, the taxicab driver who brought us out of Atlantic City on Sunday. She was planning to stay at her home on Brigantine Island, notorious for flooding. When I try to call the phone number on Toni’s business card we get the recorded message “All international circuits to the country you are calling are busy now”. Strange! I have double-checked the number.

A discussion with a dispatcher at the Atlantic City police department informed us that the roads from where we are to the marina are still closed. The closure is apparently mandated by New Jersey’s governor and the police department didn’t have control over it. We will sit tight for now and get back to Esprit when it is safe to do so.