The Vision Behind Innovating the World
The first time I was featured in a newspaper I was 27 years old, which seems a long time ago now but in any case.
I received a call from a reporter from the local newspaper and she asked me if she could write a story on us. We were living in a tiny little village with probably no more than 50 houses. The Newspaper however, was quite a big one for the local area.
She had heard about the engine we were developing and wanted to find out more about it. Of course I agreed and after the interview, she told me how nervous she was for this interview as she was worried she wouldn’t understand the technical parts. She wasn’t the only one nervous though. I was too.
German Article on the development of the RT in Bolivia
At this time we were already preparing ourselves to go on our first tour to Bolivia, which made the story quite an exciting one.
I was so optimistic and hopeful that someone would see the article and get in touch wanting to work with us and continue to fund us.
And something like that actually happened but let me just take a minute and explain what problems we actually tried to solve with our technologies.
So, my father and I started working on the concept-idea of the TU523 that was first called the microplane.
My father used to travel regularly between our homes in Germany and England by Ryanair and realised that the most flexible means of transport is the car. As long as there is a suitable road to drive on, you can have a point to point connection.
The problem with airports is that you first need to get there, so for us this was a 1 ½ hour journey in Germany and 2 ½ hour journey in England.
The idea of the TU523 was to change that with vertical take off and landing capabilities. We would be able to go point to point without the need for new and expensive infrastructure and would especially not have to rely on an airport infrastructure.
TU523 concept image with shipping container
Vertical Take off and landing aircraft is nothing new. Whilst there are a few in development right now the Osprey with it’s VTOL capabilities is probably the most famous one ever built. But even in Germany VTOL aircraft were in development. The Dornier DO 31 with its first flight in Feb. 1967 for example.
The problem is the aircraft demonstrated very low payloads and were just not commercially viable.
By Making the TU523 a hybrid electric aircraft propelled by 16 electric turbines that would be gimbal mounted to the fuselage so that they have full manoeuvrability and reactions speeds within split seconds we were certain that it could be produced at a fraction of the cost of conventional aircraft and make transportation a commercially viable option.
Also, while many companies are hailing their goals to transport passengers, the market for transporting goods is much greater and we saw a gap in the market especially in developing countries that do not have an infrastructure network like we have in Europe and developed countries which has for decades limited their economic growth, which is why we focused on the TU523 to be an aircraft to transport freight in form of shipping containers.
There was one problem though. The Generator, to deliver enough energy to the electric turbines during take off, flight and landing did not exist, and it took a lot of research and experimentation until we found a design that promised an, enormous power to weight ratio, while emitting near to 0 emissions.
Conventional engines use crankshafts that are and have to be very heavy, but we were certain that there must be a way we could eliminate the need of a crankshaft.
Without going into too much detail, the RT was conceptualised and instead of a heavy crankshaft we would use a sinus disc that would reduce the weight of the entire engine significantly.
We also were able to address the efficiency issues.
Conventional engines lose around 40% in efficiency through heat transfer without considering the losses through the exhaust heat.
Efficiencies in conventional Piston engines vs. the RT
Anyway, we designed a piston within piston design that allows the heat from the combustion to be transferred into a “steam chamber” allowing us to harvest additional energy from the heat that is wasted in a conventional system.
The TU523 became an application of the RT and we discovered many more areas where the RT can be applied to produce energy effectively, clean and affordably.
The design of the RT is scalable, so that you could power a vehicle or a Megawatt producing Powerplant.
It was the RT that we presented to Bolivia’s President Evo Morales at the time.
RT Prototype presented to President Evo Morales
So that is the general gist of the tech we were working on and there were definitely several obstacles to jump along the way but before we get into that, back to the article and the phone calls that I was hoping for.
I don’t actually know how they found this article of the Euskirchen Newspaper that only has a population of around 60 thousand people but in any case,
I receive this phone call from Austria from 3 guys. 2 of them were engineers the other had some connections to investment and money, which all sounded quite promising. I met my father and these guys in Austria to see if something would come off it.
Unfortunately, nothing serious ever developed from this meeting although I am still in contact with one of those guys today.
Who knows what the future holds.
Between then and now, that have been many more articles written about my vision and the solutions that we were trying to bring to the market and I felt privileged some publications and online articles have been published by some quite prominent publishers, however, when you run out of money and forced into a corner and no one engages and wants to be involved.
Well actually people wanting to be involved was never really an issue, a lot of people wanted to be involved but they were mostly people just wanting to jump on the bandwagon.
Anyway, I hope you get the gist. To continue our development we needed money, which I didn’t have anymore and didn’t get from any of the articles that were published however prominent the magazine might have been. I think with social media today, it translates to, it doesn’t actually matter on the number of likes you get, if no one is buying into you then it’s just a nice thing to boast about.
With all that said, the BBC was very keen on featuring us under the condition that we could show them our TU523 in flight but just as we received our new circuit boards maxing out my credit card my software engineer left the business and it left me with all the components a great vision for the future of VTOL aviation but no one to support me to realise it.
I just want to clarify that I don’t want to make my Software developer look bad in any way. He has been extremely supportive over the time we were working on the TU523 in 2014 and 2015 and it was just bad timing, I guess.
As I had mentioned in many of my previous videos, the loss of my father was difficult for me to handle and I did make many mistakes, one of them maybe not having been able to build a stronger network during the development.
As such my biggest “Regret”, as much as I dislike using the word, is not having had the courage of utilising the power of video and YouTube to the max a lot earlier.
However, there are many other factors to the story as to why we haven’t been successful, but I will have to cover those in a separate video.
These articles are nice to look at and it is a reminder of some of the best times but also some of the worst times but maybe most importantly, they spark this little voice in me…
Hey! Get up! You are not done yet!...
