James DeLaurier

Born in Pontiac, Michigan in 1941 and raised in Illinois, James has been captivated by aviation since his youth. But, despite long wanting to fly like a bird, he was no Daedalus. In place of feather and wax wings, early on James opted instead to build rudimentary flapping-wing balsa and rubber band models – efforts that, whether he then realized it or not, pointed to his later success as an aeronautical engineer.

After high school, James earned a BSc from the University of Illinois and then, in 1970, a PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University. He enjoyed summer jobs at NASA Ames Research Center (down the road from Stanford) and, upon graduation, performed his post-doc research at the von Karman Institute in Belgium. James worked in Industry for four years before joining UTIAS in 1974, where he directed the Subsonic Aerodynamics Laboratory.

During his career, James published on varied aspects of aeronautics. Some of his earliest research looked at developing a technique to analyze the stability of cable-body systems used for towing or tethering aerial vehicles. Another research project, this one conducted at the U of Toronto, studied airships, specifically their flight dynamics and survivability in atmospheric turbulence. This work determined that airships could experience greater loads during turbulence than during piloted manoeuvers, and that active-control stability and decreased speeds at low altitude are critical to an airship’s safe operation.

Over the course of his research, James also developed a model for an unsteady airfoil based on the “marching-vortex” concept, established an analytical method to predict tethered-aerostat responses to atmospheric turbulence, and determined new methodologies for calculating wing drag.  Additionally, he conducted a study of an oscillating-wing windmill. Between 1982 and 1985, he carried out research for the United States Air Force’s Geophysics Laboratory on scientific balloon instrumentation.

James’s findings have led also to patented designs, including those granted for a delta wing hybrid airship and a microwave-powered aircraft. The latter patent came about following James’s work during the first half of the 1980s, when he conducted research on a Stationary High Altitude Relay Platform (SHARP) for the federal government’s Communications Research Centre. Research for this project at UTIAS included wind-tunnel testing of candidate models, optimum propeller design and development, creation of an airplane synthesis computer program to establish performance parameters for a microwave beam powered high-altitude relay-platform, and assessments of suitable configurations for the aircraft, which ruled out the use of airships and helicopters as flight platforms. James and his colleagues’ work pointed to an airplane combining a long, thin, aerodynamically-efficient wing with a large, circular disk for efficient power collection – a design dubbed “ISIS” because of the disk’s sun-like shape.

Between his arrival at the University of Toronto in 1974 until his retirement in 2006, James made one of his greatest contributions to Canadian aviation: his teaching and mentorship of countless students. Many of his graduates went on to impressive careers, some even becoming future colleagues. In the words of one, Cameron Robertson, James brought a “unique mindset and culture” to his teaching that empowered and inspired his students “to envision daring solutions and overcome intimidating obstacles.” It is no surprise therefore that so many of his graduates produced award-winning accomplishments, including the successful team at Aerovelo, to which Canada’s Aviation Hall of Fame awarded the Belt of Orion Award for Excellence in 2015.

Aerovelo, of course, is renowned for successfully designing the world’s first successful human-powered ornithopter – Snowbird – as well as the most successful human-powered helicopter, Atlas (which won the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize). For James, when ‘Snowbird’ took flight in 2010, it represented the culmination of journey that began decades earlier while working at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio. There, in 1973, James met Jeremy Harris. Both men were keenly interested in ornithopters, intrigued and captivated by an aerodynamic design problem that had stumped designers for millennia. They soon began to collaborate on their shared hobby and, for the next twenty years, their ideas evolved through a series of wind tunnel tests and computer simulations.

Unlike fixed-wind designs, for which wings provide the lift and engines the thrust, the wing of a flapping-wing aircraft both lifts and propels. Ornithopters are thus inherently more complex than more traditional aircraft, requiring an added mechanism to flap the wings, which must themselves be strong enough to sustain higher additional stresses than those for a fixed-wing machine. Although Ornithopters achieve lift like any other airplane, James’s work was integral to cracking the problem of thrust. He determined that propulsion could be provided by what he describes as leading-edge suction: on the flapping wing’s motion, oncoming air is forced up over its leading-edge, creating a low-pressure region that integrates to provide a forward thrust.

In 1991, James and Jeremy’s design had reached the stage of a remote-controlled flying model. Known as Mr. Bill, named for a small Claymation character of perpetual ill fortune (research involving numerous failures requires a sense of humour), the model employed a unique patented wing design consisting of three panels: a rigid centre section, which utilized a Scotch-yoke mechanism to produce vertical oscillatory motion, and hinged outer sections that “flapped” on account of the centre section’s oscillating movement. Its success pointed the way to a full-scale aircraft. But scaling an ornithopter is different from a propeller or jet-propelled aircraft, and it would be years before a full-sized version was ready for a test flight.

In 2006, “The Great Flapper” the full-scale iteration of the Mr. Bill design, equipped with a small boost-jet engine and carbon fibre and Kevlar wings, was ready for another test flight. Shortly after 10:00 a.m. on 8 July, the ornithopter took off, flying some 300 meters in about 14 seconds – two longer than the Wright brothers’ first flight. For the first time a human (pilot Jack Sanderson) had successfully flown a flapping wing aircraft, a monumental moment in the history of aviation, and a fitting capstone to James’s career as professor of aeronautical engineering.

Retirement has not dampened James’s interest in aeronautical engineering, although it has provided him more time to try to get his old AJS motorcycle to start. His very understanding wife, Susan, allows him to keep a large low-turbulence wind tunnel in the basement that he uses to conduct tests on high-performance airfoils. He remains a consultant for Lighter than Air Research on a large modern rigid airship, now nearing completion in California and his latest book, Aircraft Design Concepts, was published in 2022. James has also continued advising and working on projects stemming from his interest in ornithopters, including Aerovelo’s work on Snowbird and Atlas. Collectively, these projects represent critical contributions to three aeronautical firsts: the first powered ornithopter, the first human-powered ornithopter, and first human-powered helicopter.