Disambiguating "HAWT"

Oh, ha-ha, Loyd, in his haste, omitted mass as a performance factor, which he well knew essential, as an avid kite expert himself. Loyd decided conservatively to only include what was first calculated. Even more absurd, his turbine-on-a-wing concept was nothing but a calculation short-cut. He was appalled that it got taken literally the boy-geniuses of GoogleX, but was too shy to contradict (as I did from 2007-on, predicting "cannot possibly succeed").

A close reading of Loyd shows he believed in simple classic kites, just was not ready to do the math rigorously, and then never got around to it. His paper then slept for 20yrs, hardly noticed.

Had Loyd not cut those corners, Google might own the sky. We even had to stop them from secretly trying to privatize airspace in the US Congress. Rebelling from the inside of the Joby-Google AWEC circle, I was the whistle-blower to the aviation communities (AOPA, EAA, FAA etc.). The skies remain open under the old "Freedom-of-the-Seas" legal principle. AWE belongs to everybody!

On Friday, August 7, 2020, 03:35:35 PM CDT, dave santos wrote:

Sorry Max, overlooked the "HAWT" question in the haste to reply to substantial points. For decades HAWT has only meant Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine, in wind tech (just as VAWT means Vertical Axis Wind Turbine). This is standard usage for surface-based wind turbines, but we sometimes use HAWT in context of AWES mechanisms.

A funny aspect of AWE has been how various parties attempted or succeeded in naming things. GoogleX's venture, Makani, now defunct, tried vainly to re-coin HAWT to mean "High Altitude Wind Turbine". Because Google wrongly dominated Search results, they could somewhat redefine terms at will, but conventional wind experts have never wavered from original standard usage.

Joe and I have coined more terms in Kite Energy than anyone, even "AWE" itself. The FAA would even have adopted "AWE" officially, but that acronym was already in use in the FARs. We settled on "AWES" for FARs use. As lexicographers of AWE, we can generally identify the origin of every novel term-of-art, and settle best-usage, and continue to recognize and coin AWE terms as needed.

There are several other orphaned AWE coinages out there, like Loyd's "Lift" and "Drag" modes, which he personally disavowed to me. These terms continue to muddy the water. Loyd was in a hurry when he knocked-out his classic paper, not realizing it would be taken so canonically.