Aviation Pioneer Uses Plastic to Send His Dream Soaring

Robert Adickes, who wanted to fly from age 6, finally got his start in aviation with an assist from a friend of the family, Howard Hughes.

Decades later, Adickes is following Hughes’ lead not only by starting his own aircraft company, but also by developing a new type of airplane. Adickes, 63, of Thousand Oaks is president of the Camarillo-based Avtek Corp., which recently unveiled its equivalent of Hughes’ famous all-wooden plane--a business aircraft made almost entirely of plastics.

The plane, called the Avtek 400, is the product of four years of work by Adickes and a corps of older aviation experts, dubbed the “Geritol Group.” Theirs is the first company to produce and sell a composite plastic business aircraft.

“No one had the (guts) to build a Kevlar airplane,” said Adickes, referring to the main plastic composite used to build the craft. “I came along and said I’d do it.”

And he has, devising a craft of rather odd appearance. It has a small canard, or forward wing, atop the cockpit, and two “pusher” turboprop engines mounted on top of the rear wings, facing backward.

The unique feature of the six- to nine-passenger craft, though, is its body material. Ninety percent of the body is made from Kevlar, most widely known as the main component in bulletproof vests; Nomex, a strong honeycomb-shaped plastic, and carbon fibers. They are bonded together by epoxy resins into a composition that is many times stronger than steel, Adickes said.

The ingredients--”we refer to them as the right stuff,” Adickes said--allow the fuselage and wings to be molded and bonded into a smooth surface, with no rivets to produce drag. Only the engines and landing gear have metal parts.

The company claims that the ingredients, supplied mainly by E.I. Du Pont Co., allow the plane to fly farther, faster and with less fuel than a similarly sized conventional plane made from aluminum.

“I’ve been in aviation for 40 years,” Adickes said. “And during that time, there have been only two innovations . . . the jet engine and the composite airplane. Everything else has been the same during my life. . . . There’s been no real improvement.”

However glorious the title of aviation pioneer may be, Adickes acknowledges that his main motivation is an old-fashioned one-- making money.

“There’s been only two people who put their names on an airplane and made money,” he said, citing Hughes’ launching of Hughes Aircraft Co., and J.S. McDonnell’s founding of the McDonnell Douglas Corp. He mentioned Allan H. Lockheed and John K. Northrop as examples of those who were not as successful.

“I tried to analyze why all these creative people died broke . . . and it’s because they got so wrapped up in the romance and the mythology of it all, they lost sight of the financial side,” Adickes said.

John Carroll, a close friend, described Adickes as a workaholic with a “combination of financial knowledge, aviation experience and a personality with an incurable drive to do things. He’ll sit in his office and type his own letters on the weekends and sometimes during the week.”

Adickes’ involvement with composite airplanes dates to 1937, when Hughes was experimenting with a glued-together wooden aircraft at a time when most planes were made of riveted metal.

Adickes then was a high school senior in Houston with plans to spend the summer in Los Angeles. He wrote a letter to Hughes, who had lived near his family in Texas, asking for a job. Hughes gave him one, stirring the cooking glue in a Glendale factory that would bond together the wooden parts of a racing airplane Hughes was building.

Hughes went on to use that technology to build the huge Spruce Goose, now on display in Long Beach, which he flew in 1947.

After training as a naval pilot, Adickes was hired by Hughes as a pilot at Trans World Airlines, which Hughes owned. It was his boyhood dream come true.

“There’s a sense of freedom, a sense of reliance you get from flying,” he said. “You get up there, and no one’s going to get you down but you.”

Adickes said he began considering the market for a fuel-efficient business aircraft when the Arab oil boycott in the early 1970s caused aviation fuel costs to skyrocket.

He learned more about the technology after meeting Leo Windecker, who a few years earlier had built the first composite plastic aircraft to be certified for flight by the federal government. Adickes also helped in the financing for an all-composite airplane that William Lear, the airplane manufacturer, planned to build. That plane is still in the works.

But not until 1980, when he retired from TWA--”the day they retired me, they found claw marks on the control wheel,” Adickes joked--did he begin the hard planning of the aircraft.

Along with Windecker and several other aviation experts, the first Avtek 400 came to life as parts were molded in the rear of the firm’s Camarillo offices.

The general aviation community, witness to many good ideas on paper that did not stand up to close inspection, was not enthusiastic about Adickes’ idea at first.

“There’s a lot of guys who come to air shows and announce plans . . . and you tend to discount them until they show something,” said one industry observer. “But the involvement of Du Pont was an early indication that Adickes was more than a lone eagle working in his basement.”

The ceremonial inaugural flight of the Avtek 400, before 1,500 friends, investors and reporters in late September, was a success. The plane is now being readied for further flight and structural testing, and Adickes hopes to roll out the first production aircraft in May, 1986.

Adickes said he has already sold, before production, 120 of the $1.65-million planes. Although the corporate base is in Camarillo, he said he is looking in other parts of the country for a final assembly plant.