ONE OF THE BIG PLEASURES OF BEING THE GRAND POOBAH OF THE HA-HA IS GETTING TO WRITE THE BIOS FOR THE OWNERS OF THE BOATS. SOME HAVE SOME VERY INTERESTING LIVES.
When Douglas Thorpe offered information on himself, he noted that in addition to having worked for sailboat manufacturers MacGregor, Ericson, and Fast Passage, he had a lot of experience with drones. So we Googled him and got to know a lot more:
Douglas Thorpe's Research Sailing Vessel "Argo"
"On an overcast morning in late May 1976, Douglas Thorpe ’82, then a UC Irvine freshman, was on his way to school when a small plane fell out of the sky. The single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza crashed in an empty field near campus, killing everyone on board. Thorpe was first on the scene, and what he saw changed his life.
“The doomed plane flew past my car as I was driving to class,” Thorpe recalls. “There were four souls on board. The [injuries they] suffered left an emotional scar on me. I was just 18 at the time and very impressionable. I became very fearful of flying after witnessing firsthand how bad things can go.”
A mechanical engineering major, Thorpe eventually became interested in unmanned aerial vehicles – UAVs, or drones – because they could save lives.
For more than three decades, he’s designed, developed and manufactured more than 30 different types of remotely operated flying machines. His drones weigh anywhere from 5 to 1,600 pounds and perform all kinds of tasks, including military reconnaissance and modern-day prospecting – searching for gold and oil deposits by flying over hard-to-reach terrain.
“In professional flying, there are missions that are simply dull, dirty or dangerous and… can end a person’s life. That’s what makes drones so exciting to me,” says Thorpe, a 2014 recipient of the UCI Alumni Association’s Lauds & Laurels Distinguished Alumnus award. “You don’t have to put someone’s life in jeopardy anymore.”
The owner of drone manufacturer Thorpe Seeop Corp. in Mesa, Ariz., he has produced and sold more than 30,000 commercial UAVs, aerial targets (used to train anti-aircraft crews) and remote-control model airplanes. “If you placed each airframe end to end, the line would stretch over 27 miles – the distance from Aldrich Park to Catalina,” Thorpe says. “That’s a lot of little planes.”
He’s designed little planes that are both propeller-driven and turbine-powered, that both take off from runways and are ejected from missile launch tubes via military aircraft.
His creations have been employed in agriculture, flying low over fields to release fertilizer, herbicides or even pest-eating insects on organic farms. They can improve irrigation by scanning crops with infrared cameras to see if they’re suffering from water stress – in advance of such symptoms as wilting.
“There have been drones working on farms, especially overseas, long before Amazon proposed using them for its same-day delivery service,” Thorpe says. “In the near future, drones will be flying on virtually every farm in the United States.”
Mining companies enlist his drones to scour topography in search of everything from gravel to gold deposits. They’ve also been utilized to hunt for new sources of oil and natural gas.”
Pretty cool, no?
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