“We’ve made very few changes to the design as we’ve developed the kit,” said Fellows. His company, Composite Creations of Prineville, Oregon, licensed the design and is bringing the plane to market as a kit.īased on experience gained through working for many years at Lancair in nearby Bend, Oregon, the staff of Composite Creations has a long history of fabricating airframes and other components from carbon fiber. Walter Fellows, a retired investment banker from Seattle, has joined the Gweduck team to carry the project forward. He was 50 when he started the Gweduck project. “We can fly from Seattle to Sitka non-stop in around five and a half hours and we love flying along the coast of Alaska at 500′,” said Ellison with the satisfied look of a man whose dream has come true through hard work and perseverance. To allow docking, the two wing tip floats are retractable.Īfter years of flights around the Northwest, summer trips to Alaska, and appearances at SUN ‘n FUN, EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, and other airshows, the prototype is a proven performer with 1,200 flight hours. The MT propellers have flat-pitch, feathering and reversing capabilities. The solution came from examining photos of the Japanese Shin-Meiwa flying boat, which has “ducts” running along both sides of the hull to capture and control the spray.Ĭounter-rotating 300-horsepower Lycoming IO-540 engines were chosen to power the six-passenger plane. Next came the problem of controlling prop spray during takeoff. “The well-known Widgeon porpoising problem was duplicated first and we kept fine-tuning the model until we had an extremely benign hull shape,” he said. Interchangeable “slippers” made it possible to change hull designs easily and to quickly prove what worked best, according to Ellison. When it became obvious that the Widgeon’s hull design needed to be completely changed, an 11′ radio-controlled quarter-scale model was fabricated and powered with two chainsaw engines. “We then worked to keep the good characteristics and avoid all the others.” “Together, we put together a matrix of the flying characteristics of the better-known amphibians, both good and bad,” he said. “The advent of the Internet provided a rich resource of information from NACA reports,” added Ellison. They also consulted David Thurston, a former Grumman engineer who designed the Skimmer amphibian, which later became the Lake Buccaneer. “Bryan was with Boeing and headed production of the PBY Catalina in Vancouver, BC, during World War II.” “The design stage took a decade and Bryan Mahon, Ross Mahon’s father, was one of our greatest resources of information,” explained Ellison. Their timing was good, however, since numerous Boeing retirees live in the Seattle area and the early 1990s offered one of the last opportunities to tap the expertise of flying boat designers and pilots who had experience with the Boeing 314 “China Clipper” and Grumman amphibians. Also, if not carefully controlled, the Widgeon has a tendency to porpoise during water landings, a trait that has led to serious accidents.Ĭomposite construction was the obvious answer to the corrosion problem, but rather than just build a fiberglass copy of the Widgeon, Ellison and Mahon did extensive research and soon realized they did not know enough about flying boats. However, he soon realized that an aluminum airplane operating in salt water would literally “dissolve” over time due to corrosion. Fisher)Įllison, who invented the Ellison Throttle Body for aircraft engines and ran that business for 34 years, had planned to buy a Widgeon to replace the deHavilland Beaver on floats he used to commute from Seattle to his boat, which was moored at Roche Harbor in the San Juan Islands. Gweduck designer and owner Ben Ellison, Jim Schoeggl, who helped build the plane, and Walter Fellows of Composite Creations, at SUN ‘n FUN 2019. That’s a milestone for the project, which began in 1990 when Gweduck lead designer Ben Ellison and Ross Mahon saw a Widgeon taxi by at their home airport in Renton, Washington, near Seattle. One of the biggest hits at last year’s Seaplane-A-Palooza - and SUN ‘n FUN - was the Gweduck Flying Boat, an amphibian inspired by the 1940s Grumman Widgeon. As winter continues its merciless hold on most of the country, many pilots are starting to plan their 2020 airshow season, including a trip to the SUN ‘n FUN Aerospace Expo, known as the official kick-off to the season.Ī precursor to the SUN ‘n FUN activities is Seaplane-A-Palooza, traditionally held the weekend before SUN ‘n FUN in Tavares, Florida, which is known as the Seaplane City.
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