Written by AMA Staff (11/2009); Formatted by JS (04/2010)
Dan Kreigh (pronounced “kray”) is [a] Scaled Composites innovator, a former childhood modeler, and a lifetime AMA member. He showed up at Burt Rutan’s company for an interview with a van full of models. It was a big hit and he got the job.
“They saw my passion for building model airplanes and I saw that the kind of construction they did at Scaled was not much different,” said the trained aerospace engineer. “I still do models 20 years later.”
What fires Dan’s jets these days is his longtime passion for designing a workable flying car – or, as he also calls it, a “roadable airplane.” Dan said:
“One of the things that was kind of bothering me about home-built airplanes is that people spend an awful lot of money on hangars for airplanes to just sit. But do you take the wings with you or leave them behind? Three of four wheels? One engine or two? And the landing gear is the most challenging thing for me.”
While Dan is working on this tricky project, he has found success in a more modest endeavor: designing one of the first aerobatic indoor model airplanes, called the IFO, or Indoor Flying Object.
“I demonstrated the IFO to a group of indoor flyers out of Burbank,” he recalls. “They’d never seen an outside loop done indoors. I did a few rolls and landed it, and they were just, like, quiet. Then everybody just broke out into applause.”
Joe Bok will be available to attendees throughout the Expo. He builds such authentic models of full-scale aircraft that he was asked to create airplanes for the award-winning 2004 movie, The Aviator. The biopic on Howard Hughes featured Joe’s models of the H-1 and the Spruce Goose. Joe restored old airplane engines, and he is bringing a huge 18-cylinder Curtiss-Wright to display at the [2010 AMA] Expo. Built in the mid-1950s for Howard Hughes’ TWA Lockheed Constellation, the 3,800-horsepower, turbo-compound power plant was the latest in piston technology; it was the furthest that technology had progressed before turbines and jets.
“When people see this, they go absolutely nuts!” he said.
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