Nick Guida, the founder of Tamarack Aerospace Group, told Flying that the budget and staff cuts associated with sequestration along with a flawed sequencing system, which is apparently no longer in effect, became too much of a barrier for the Supplemental Type Certification for its Active Technology Load Alleviation System (ATLAS). But Guida was not about to give up on the progress of his design. Instead, he decided to work with the folks from EASA.
While the company had to pay a fee for the EASA service, Guida said that going through the STC process in Europe appeared a more predictable solution at the time. He has been working on the project in England since January and said all of the testing is now complete along with most of the documentation. The STC sign off is expected by the end of the summer and, to stay ahead of the game, Guida has already applied for validation with the FAA.
The ATLAS active winglets move independently of the airplane’s control surfaces to reduce the load on the wing during turbulence or other high load conditions. This allows the winglet to be designed for optimum performance without the fear of damaging the wing. We tested the first installation of the winglets on a Cirrus SR22. Read the full report from that flight here.
While the winglets were first tested on the Cirrus, the main goal was to work the system onto larger airplanes, where modifications make a greater difference. The active winglets have shown good performance improvements in the company’s Cessna Citation test bed, in some cases as much as 25 percent improvement, Guida said. Tamarack has a memorandum of understanding with Cessna to install the ATLAS system on all of its 525-series airplanes (the CJ line), not including the CJ4, once the STC has been signed off.
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