On a brisk fall morning at the Custer State Park airport,
John Hillard sprinted across an open field with a propeller strapped to his
back. The 80 pounds of thrust generated by the electric motor pushed him
forward as the paraglider wing lifted over his head. In seconds he was aloft.
The inaugural flight lasted only a few minutes. But it was a milestone after
years of work to pioneer a commercial electric paramotor.
Phillip and John Hillard grew up with a love of flying
inspired by their father, a Navy helicopter pilot. Phillip finished his degree
in mechanical engineering in 2018, and his younger brother John is in his senior
year at Mines. The brothers took up paramotoring as a hobby; their training as
engineers helped them identify improvements needed to the standard gas motors
used in the sport. “We spent almost as much time tuning our two-stroke gas
engines as we did flying. We wanted to break that down and make the sport
easier to do and take it into the realm of the standard consumer,” says
Phillip.
Their fix: Go electric. Electric motors are quieter, simpler
to operate and more compact and light weight.
But pioneering a new electric paramotor system didn’t prove easy. The brothers had to overcome hurdles such as
insuring battery safety, building in redundant fail-safes, designing proper instrumentation
and keeping it all in a lightweight, compact system. “The cool thing about
being an engineer today is you can turn around designs so quick,” says John.
One morning while sitting in physics class, John had an idea on how to build
the throttle controller. “On my lunch
break I hopped on a computer and sketched it in Solid Works. I took it to a 3D
printer that afternoon,” says John. “By
the end of the day I had a working throttle.”
Phillip and John practice iterative design. “So we do as
much math and engineering as we can.
Then we build it, and we break it, and we make it better,” says John. The process is bearing fruit. Their second
version of the electric paramotor incorporated the lessons learned in the first
design. It’s 40 pounds lighter, it
includes a lithium ion battery and an electric motor designed for large crop
dusting drones. It has five layers of fail-safe redundancy built in.
Following that successful maiden flight, they are working to
secure funding to continue development of their product with the long-term goal
of making recreational flight safer, easier and more successful.