On a not so unusual day in Queens, New York, the Cross Island Parkway was in fact a parking lot. For a young man who had been raised in the vast expanse of Texas, this was culture shock...
...made worse only by the urgency of having a client sales meeting scheduled in New Jersey -- only 30 miles away as the seagull flies. In a fit of fantasy, he imagined a rotor popping up from the hood of his car to extract him from this traffic jam. He never forgot this day.
Years later after reaching into his attic to unpack the engineering textbooks, drafting dead-end ideas, and spending a little time each day on the problem, he arrived at what seemed to be a workable solution. As fortune would have it, he met with an experienced attorney with wise advice. The attorney said he should identify the essence of the innovation, and that is what he should patent. The essential idea was to remove the payload from an aircraft and then suspend it about the aircraft's pitch axis. A payload suspended in this way could stabilize the aircraft and facilitate an optimal tiltrotor design.
The young man began a quest to discover if this idea had merit. As the ever increasing demands of family and his rising sales career permitted he would seek out subject matter experts and to each say, "Please tell me why this idea will not work so that I can forget it and move on." Both to his dismay and his delight, the technical barriers raised by these experts were all eventually surmounted until one day the configuration seemed meritorious and technically sound.
Along the way he discovered the markets and customer needs that could be uniquely satisfied by this breakthrough innovation in aircraft design.
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