DAROLD CUMMINGS: Aircraft designer has eye on sky, wheels speeding over ground

As the robot hands you your heart medicine, a roasted chicken with tossed salad and a fifth of Sheep Dip, you’re momentarily blanketed by a massive bird-like shadow, swift and silent. Just as quickly the sun is shining again.

The year is 2034. Technology has advanced to the point where robots can safely deliver life-sustaining prescriptions, roast chicken that’s still warm, salad that’s still cold and the best blended Scotch with the worst-sounding name you’ve ever sipped.

The shadow? That was the 186-passenger eMSTAR all-electric airliner coasting into Coeur d’Alene Airport. The fact that it can land silently and with almost no ecological impact has made it an aeronautic sensation in Europe, where most trips are in the hundreds rather than thousands of miles. And now it’s catching on in the United States because it’s as advantageous economically as it is environmentally.

Packed with VIPs, the electric airliner is cruising home to honor its designer, Darold B. Cummings of Coeur d’Alene.

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That hypothetical moment in time is based on some pretty big assumptions. For all we know today, robots could be outlawed in a decade and a half, chicken might be a protected species and Sheep Dip, god forbid, might no longer proffer the dram of our dreams.

But Darold Cummings, 74, is a pretty good bet to still be one of the top aircraft designers in the world, and his development of the electric eMSTAR airliner for Wright Electric Company is almost certainly not a long shot.

Now in the preliminary design stage for London-based EasyJet, Cummings’ project has garnered the support of a major aerospace company and a prominent university. Like many of the classified contracts Cummings has completed and continues to attract, he’s limited in how much he can say about the ultra-competitive electric air vehicle race and his role in it. But chatting over a hot chocolate at the Innovation Den on a frigid February afternoon, the 15-year Coeur d’Alene resident is itching to unload.

“There’s going to be a lot of surprises when it’s announced who’s involved in this,” he promises.

Using a 3D printed model to give theory some weight, Cummings points to what’s on the wings — and just as importantly, what isn’t. What’s there are aerodynamic nacelles housing a series of electric fan motors positioned on the wing. They create lift. What isn’t there are massive, round nacelles under the wing that create drag.

“Instead of a drag device, you have a lift device,” Cummings explains. “That’s the big breakthrough with the eMSTAR design.”

Certainly, there’s engineering work to be done. If overcoming the weight of all the batteries needed for 300- to 600-mile flights with 186 passengers aboard were easy, the friendly skies would be full of the silent soarers already. Cummings projects it will be 10 to 15 years before these beauties are an everyday reality.

But the benefits are so overwhelming, Cummings says electric airliners are a when, not an if. And if his future is anything like his past, you’d be as unwise betting against Darold Cummings with pencil in hand as you would Tom Brady grasping pigskin.

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Since graduating from Cal State-Long Beach in 1967, Cummings has spent more than half a century working on bomber, fighter, trainer and commercial aircraft projects. Among his stellar accomplishments: In the early ’80s, working for Northrop, Cummings was chief air vehicle designer of the YF-23 Stealth Fighter. There have been many other successes along the way, acknowledged ceremoniously in 2015 with Cummings receiving the prestigious American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics Aircraft Design Award. If you’re an airplane designer, that’s the equivalent of a Nobel prize or a Pulitzer.

“For a career demonstrating the exceptional skill and creativity in the configuration and design of aircraft, inspiring future generations of aircraft designers,” the award citation reads.

That career started with North American Aviation, which later became Rockwell International, and ended with Boeing, from which he retired in 2004. But retirement to Darold Cummings, whose aircraft design company is called ForzAero (forzaero.net), simply meant continuing to work as a consultant and to play the way he’s done most of his life: On wheels, not wings.

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In his southern California garage, Darold Cummings designed and built his first mini-bike when he was 14. He dubbed it: Doodlebug. In 1988 he designed and patented Street Surfer, which combined a skateboard with a scooter front end. But what has always moved Cummings is speed. He currently holds 40 Bonneville National land speed records in small-displacement motorcycle classes. He raced sports cars, desert motorcycles, and, for a few years, designed and raced aerodynamically shaped bicycles powered not by gas and motors but by legs and feet.

Cummings has had his hand in projects ranging from flying cars to current work on a craft capable of rooftop-to-rooftop delivery of packages weighing up to 500 pounds. He can say almost nothing about the latter except that, again, people will be impressed when they see the intellectual and commercial interests behind the project.

He’s asked if he can at least tell readers if the craft are manned or unmanned, and he concedes this much:

“Unmanned is a big deal. It’s future-future. In my opinion, though, not for a long time with passengers.”

Why is that?

“I believe package delivery will be the first use of unmanned air vehicles. Loss of an aircraft will only result in lost packages. Carrying people is another story. The types of decisions and emergency actions by a skilled pilot are very reassuring to passengers. The ‘Miracle on the Hudson”’ may have been the ‘Disaster on the Hudson’ without a skilled pilot.”

The flying cars story — they’re also called Personal Air Vehicles — dates back to Cummings’ work shortly before retiring from Boeing. That really grabbed his young sons’ attention. According to an article entitled “Want to fly to work?”, Cummings said:

“When we started working on the demonstration models, my kids wanted to know when we would have it done. They couldn’t think of anything more cool than arriving at school in what amounts to a flying car.”

Darold’s youngest son, Scott, is continuing the aircraft design tradition, working in Advanced Design at Boeing.

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When he retired 15 years ago, Cummings couldn’t see himself landing anyplace but Coeur d’Alene. A sister had moved here in the 1970s, and what Cummings saw in modern-day Coeur d’Alene reminded him of what he’d enjoyed as a boy — wide-open spaces to roam, room for fishing and hunting and loads of natural beauty.

“This is heaven,” he says. “When we came up here it was like, ‘We get to do this all over again.’”

Although allegedly retired, Cummings still works relentlessly. He says 2018 was actually his busiest year ever. While he appreciates the money he makes consulting, money’s not what drives him. He simply loves working in his Sanders Beach office in the home he designed with his wife Karen, peering at Lake Coeur d’Alene over pencil drawings outlining aviation’s future.

Yes, pencil. The man with a mind beyond time is old school.

“Every time I draw a line I can see what it means in three dimensions,” Cummings says. “I see the shape going through space. I see the air molecules flowing over it.”

Darold’s oldest son, Kyle, translates Dad’s pencil drawings to CAD (computer-aided design). A Boise State graduate who works just blocks from his father at Continuous Composites in downtown Coeur d’Alene, Kyle personifies the potential Darold sees for an aerospace eruption in North Idaho.

“Who wouldn’t want to live here?” Darold asks. “In the ’60s, everybody lived within 20 miles of work. I think younger people now are looking at the bigger picture: Where do I want to live? Now you can move data so fast between people, you can easily work from home.

“Here the freeways aren’t crowded, the lake is inviting, and the air is clean. To me it doesn’t get any better than that.”