Kent, WA-based Naverus announced today it has received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to design and test “required navigation performance” flight paths for public use in the U.S. That means Naverus’s navigation software and flight patch design can now be used widely by U.S. airports and airlines to help make flights faster, safer, and more fuel-efficient. Back in April, Naverus raised $4 million in follow-on venture funding led by Foundation Capital and East Peak Partners.

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Clear, a five-year-old biometric passenger identification service intended to speed air travelers’ passage through security checkpoints, shut down last night. According to the service’s website, parent company Verified Identity Pass of New York, NY, was unable to obtain credit to continue operations. Boston’s Spark Capital led a $44.4 million Series C venture funding round for Verified Identity Pass last August. Syncom Venture Partners, Lockheed Martin, Baker Capital, GE Security, and Lehman Brothers also joined that round, which brought the company’s total funding at the time to $116.4 million.

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Terrafugia, the Woburn, MA, startup whose project to commercialize a “roadable aircraft” has attracted a worldwide following, said today that it’s completed flight testing of its initial proof-of-concept vehicle and is ready to build a second, “beta” aircraft.

The company also released extensive new video footage from test flights of the proof-of-concept plane by its test pilot, retired Air Force Colonel Phil Meteer. (We’ve embedded a couple of these videos below.)

The proof-of-concept vehicle, which Terrafugia has displayed at museums and air shows and flown 28 times from an airport in Plattsburgh, NY, is the only aircraft the company has built to date. In an announcement today, Terrafugia said it’s gotten all the data it can out of the prototype—not only demonstrating that a folding-wing aircraft fit for roadway driving can also fly, but testing its basic handling, performance, and stability on the road and during take-off and landing.

These tests constituted the first stage in a four-stage process of getting the Transition to market, the company said. It has already started work on stage 2, the beta prototype, which will incorporate modifications based on information collected during the stage 1 tests.

Terrafugia CEO Carl Dietrich—who will give a special presentation about the company at the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (XSITE), coming up June 24—told me in March that the craft’s maiden flight on March 5 and its subsequent test flights bring “a new level of credibility” to an effort that many observers have dismissed as quixotic.

Two of Terrafugia’s newest videos follow below.

Test 1146, May 6, 2009

Test 1151, May 6, 2009

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After a flurry of Northwest deals the previous week, the past seven days have been fairly quiet, with some activity in security software, aviation, and biotech.

—Kent, WA-based Naverus, a company that makes advanced navigation systems for airlines and air traffic managers, raised $4 million from existing investors Foundation Capital and East Peak Partners. I got the story behind the company and its efforts to make flight paths greener and more efficient, from chief marketing officer Dottie Hall (a very early Microsoft employee from the late 1970s).

—Washington state’s venture capital numbers for the first quarter of 2009 came in, and not surprisingly, they’re pretty grim. But they’re certainly not without hope, as VCs from OVP Venture Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and Buerk Dale Victor told me in an interview. We also tallied the state’s top five venture deals of the first quarter, which span the areas of biotech, lasers, user interfaces, and cloud computing software.

—Seattle-based Haute Secure, a maker of anti-malware security software, has been acquired by TRUSTe, an online privacy firm in San Francisco. Financial terms were not disclosed. Haute Secure was funded by Baseline Ventures and Sherpalo Ventures.

—GridNetworks, an online video startup in Seattle, is merging with Global Media Services, a New York firm. No financial terms were given. The combined company will provide streaming video and other media services for personal computers, mobile devices, and TV. GridNetworks was founded in 2005, and was backed by Comcast, Cisco, and Panorama Capital.

—Portland, OR-based SignaCert, an IT security and management software startup, raised $8.8 million in Series B funding. The round was led by existing investors including DCM, Intel Capital, and SmartForest Ventures. In-Q-Tel and other strategic investors also participated.

—Luke reported that BiPar Sciences, a Brisbane, CA-based developer of cancer drugs, is being acquired by Paris, France-based Sanofi-Aventis in a deal that could be worth up to $500 million if the company’s lead drug candidate reaches certain milestones. Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital led a $13 million Series A funding round in BiPar in 2004.

—Lastly, we ran a two-part feature story on how some of Seattle’s most prominent venture dealmakers are approaching the University of Washington’s tech transfer office, and its researchers, in search of the next great UW spinout. The consensus seems to be that the UW has long been a world leader in commercializing technologies, and now the intensity has been jacked up an extra notch.

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There’s a saying in sports that if you don’t notice the referees, they’re doing a great job. The same goes for offensive linemen in football, tech support in big companies…and Kent, WA-based Naverus when you’re flying in an airplane. Sure, we in the media notice companies like Naverus when they raise $4 million in venture funding in a tough climate for follow-on financing (announced last Friday). But, truth be told, we’ve had our eye on this interesting aircraft-navigation tech company for a while now.

Naverus was founded in 2003 by a pair of Alaska Airlines pilots, Steve Fulton and Hal Andersen, and former Coinstar CEO Dan Gerrity. The idea was to commercialize an emerging technique known as “required navigation performance” (RNP), which harnesses advanced avionics and GPS technology to guide airplanes’ flight paths on approaches and departures in such a precise way as to do away with ground-based navigation—and what’s more, make flight paths faster and more fuel-efficient, and reduce carbon emissions to boot. The technique was originally developed to help planes take off and land at Juneau International Airport and other remote locations where pilots have to deal with dangerous weather conditions and mountains.

It’s all part of a broader shift in aviation practices called Performance-based Navigation, which uses cutting-edge sensors, communications equipment, and sophisticated flight computers, to work out airplanes’ flight paths—an area that Naverus contributes to across the board. The company has been part of a “fundamental transformation of how air navigation takes place,” says Dottie Hall, chief marketing officer at Naverus. Hall would know; she was a founding vice president of Eclipse Aviation in Albuquerque, NM, and has owned and managed touring operations of vintage airplanes, including her own 1950s-era Lockheed Constellation. And yes, she has her pilot’s license. (Hall was also a very early employee at Microsoft in the late 1970s, but that’s another story.)

To give some idea of the benefits of Naverus’s technology, Hall points out that Southwest Airlines, a flagship customer, saves on the order of one minute per flight using RNP—and that translates into about 155,000 tons of carbon dioxide saved per year. Fuel savings are in the ballpark of …Next Page »

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Kent, WA-based Naverus, a maker of novel navigation software for airlines, announced today it has raised $4 million in funding led by Foundation Capital and East Peak Partners. Naverus has developed a performance-based navigation system, which provides precise flight paths that are faster and more fuel-efficient and reduce carbon emissions. The company has airline customers in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and China.

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New ideas for alternative energy and cleantech were in the air on Tuesday at the University of Washington, which hosted a regional meeting of the National Academy of Engineering and a public symposium on energy topics. We’ve taken a keen interest in this subject lately at Xconomy as we prepare for our own Northwest cleantech event next week, and wanted to hear from a couple of our very own Xconomists—Ed Lazowska of UW computer science and engineering (who co-organized the meeting), and Charles M. Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and the former president of MIT.

In his opening remarks, Vest noted that the National Academy of Engineering will soon release a report called “America’s Energy Future.” “We hope it will become a bible for policymakers to understand what the technological and economic facts are about most of the major technologies that may play a role in the next 10 to 20 years in the distribution, generation, and transportation of electrical energy,” Vest said. “It will not be a policy document, but it will be a basis of facts which we hope those in Congress and the administration will utilize.”

Here are a few highlights from three of the ensuing energy talks:

—Rob Pratt, a staff scientist and program manager at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, spoke about “smart grid” technologies and how minute-by-minute communications and monitoring of energy use could lead to huge overall savings in cost and carbon emissions.

In California, for example, an estimated 1 percent decrease in electricity demand would lead to a 10 percent decrease in energy bills, because electricity generation is most expensive during times of peak demand (e.g., hot summer days). That could translate into some $50 billion in savings for the U.S., if people had enough information about power usage to adjust their consumption levels.

Pratt presented the results of a trial of 112 homes on the Olympic Peninsula, in which letting customers explicitly control their energy usage and savings (and guaranteeing they would not pay more than normal) led to a 15 percent decrease in peak load demand over the course of a year. “You need a simple, intuitive interface,” Pratt said. “Do you need standards for [smart grid] communication? Ours were simple—you need to understand cost, quantity, and time.”

As for his outlook, Pratt said, “I predict this country will embark on an energy efficiency program that will make anything else we’ve done look like child’s play.” He noted that the cleanest power plants are the ones that produce energy for intermediate demand levels—not the peak, not the lowest. And he sees a big opportunity in electric vehicles, provided people manage the timing of charging them up. Giving consumers and utilities minute-by-minute data to track usage levels will be crucial. “The smart grid can help sort this out,” he said. “If we buy the smart grid, this is free. This is like software.”

—Tim Rahmes, biofuels program manager at Boeing (he’s based in Everett, WA), spoke about his team’s recent efforts to test biofuels for aviation. Boeing’s customers in the airline and defense industries are concerned with carbon emissions, fuel availability, and fuel costs, he said. The most important thing about Boeing’s biofuel effort is that it must be sustainable, and not compete with …Next Page »

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After Terrafugia’s heavily attended press conference this morning announcing the maiden flight of the company’s drivable aircraft, the Transition, I buttonholed founder and CEO Carl Dietrich for a one-on-one interview. He said the flight, which took place on March 5, is probably “the biggest single milestone” that Terrafugia could have achieved—and that the company is now in a strong position to raise more money as it continues with testing and development of its “flying car” and eventually moves toward manufacturing.

If venture or private-equity investors don’t come through, Dietrich says the company has good leads on “a couple” of possible corporate investors. Interestingly, Dietrich says it’s not clear yet whether the Transition will actually be manufactured in Massachusetts. The company has “proposals from all around the country” for siting its manufacturing facilities—but for now, the company’s modest garage in Woburn, MA, will do, he says.

Here’s the full interview:

Xconomy: Having reached this goal, how do you feel now about the prospects for real long-term success? Do you feel like you’ve cleared a big barrier, gotten over a hump?

Carl Dietrich: It’s definitely a big barrier. It’s the first question everyone asks—”Has it flown yet?” And it brings a new level of credibility to the company to say, “Yes, it has flown.” We have proven that we can build a vehicle in this configuration. This is a completely new configuration, that flies, that drives. So from that perspective, it is probably the biggest single milestone in the overall development of the company. There are lots of little milestones. But the first flight of the first vehicle—that is a big one. That is kind of the biggest one.

X: So, following on that, do you feel like this puts you in a better position for going back out and raising more investment when the time comes? I’m assuming you need to ramp up the scale of everything to start manufacturing”?

CD: Absolutely. We do feel it puts us in a better position. That was actually part of our plan, to wait until the first flight and then go back out and hit the dirt and see what’s coming, see what we can come up with. That is part of the plan for the coming months, to start moving that process forward and see if we can get interest on the institutional investment side. And if we can’t, we’ve actually got a couple of good corporate leads. Who knows where those could go.

X: Do you think that you’ll actually build the production vehicles here in Massachusetts, or haven’t you decided that yet?

CD: It really hasn’t been determined at this point. Obviously I have selfish reasons for not wanting to move. But the bottom line is still the bottom line. We’ve gotten proposals from all around the country, and actually overseas, to do manufacturing. And we don’t know yet what we’re going to do. There are a lot of different things to weigh in the decision. At this time it doesn’t benefit us to make that decision. We are going to be in development for another couple of years before we really need a lot more room. Or at least, more than a year of additional time before we need a lot more space. And there is no advantage to us committing to someplace right now until we actually are close. In the meantime we will hopefully just continue to build the company’s credibility, so that people can say, “Hey, if they keep going they really are going to create hundreds of jobs,” and what’s that worth? So that’s what we’re looking to do right now.

X: Do you anticipate having a series of more public events, public flights, with journalists present, eventually?

CD: Eventually. When that will be, I can’t make any commitments at this point. We are testing this vehicle at Plattsburgh International Airport, which is actually a TSA-controlled field. So we actually had to go get badged, which was a multi-week process. We had to go through a training program, in order to get out onto the grounds, and then our camera crew, which couldn’t go through that training, the documentary crew that is following us, they actually had to get escorted out onto the field, and somebody has to sit there and wait with them, as they are out there filming the vehicle.

X: So somebody is making a documentary? Is it WGBH or somebody?

CD: No, it’s actually an independent film crew. A couple of our investors are producers, so they’ve actually been following us from the beginning. They are going to have a nice product that they’ll be able to leverage. It’s a win-win.

X: Why did you pick Plattsburgh—I mean, why that airport?

CD: A couple of reasons. The biggest one is that it’s an old B-52 bomber base. Phil [Meteer, the test pilot for the first flight] talked about how for this Phase 1 of testing, where you just want to take off and touch down, you want …Next Page »

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[Update, 2:30 p.m., March 18, 2009: We've just published an extensive followup interview with Carl Dietrich, Terrafugia's founder and CEO.]

Ever since my first visit to Terrafugia’s Woburn, MA, warehouse last May to see the startup’s Transition “roadable aircraft,” I’ve been pestering CEO Carl Dietrich to clue us in about the craft’s first flight. He was always a bit cagey, saying that the maiden flight wouldn’t be announced in advance and that the press wouldn’t be invited, for safety and security reasons. (That’s understandable, I guess—I wouldn’t want me around either, if something went wrong.)

Well, true to Dietrich’s word, Terrafugia conducted its first flight in secrecy, at 7:40 a.m. on March 5. But it’s only revealing that fact to the world today, in a dramatic press conference taking place at this hour at the Boston Museum of Science, where a prototype of the Transition is on temporary exhibit. [I'm adding details from the press conference below, as well as videos of the first flight on the second page of this story.]

The first Transition flight lasted only 37 seconds and covered about 3,000 feet. It took place directly over the runway at Plattsburgh International Airport in Plattsburgh, NY, a location selected because of its extremely long runway and low traffic. The flight was piloted by Phil Meteer, a retired Air Force colonel.

“With this achievement, Terrafugia has set the stage for personal aviation,” Dietrich said at the press conference.

Travel has now become “a hassle-free integrated air-land experience,” Dietrich added in a statement distributed at the conference. “It’s what aviation enthusiasts have been striving for since 1918″—the date of the first experiments with roadable aircraft.

Meteer was also the pilot for six subsequent test flights, including a more extensive spin around the Plattsburgh airport. “It was apparent to me from the moment of takeoff that I had control of a very stable aircraft,” Meteer said at the press conference. “I had a test plan…and after a minute I realized my daughter could do this, it was fun, anyone could do it.”

Angel-funded Terrafugia has been working on the Transition since 2006, when Dietrich, a 31-year-old with bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT, won the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for various cool inventions, including a pumpless rocket engine. He put the money into the company, which became a $10,000 runner-up in the 2006 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. From their Woburn facility, a nondescript former garage door factory, Dietrich’s team has been hard at work on the two-seat, four-wheeled, carbon-fiber-composite aircraft, which can fly up to 450 miles at 115 miles per hour and is distinguished by folding wings that ratchet out of the way when it’s on the ground. That makes the craft just 80 inches wide, narrow enough to tool down the highway—where it can go up to 65 mph and get 30 miles to the gallon.

The Transition isn’t designed to be anyone’s primary ground vehicle. (For the estimated $194,000 sticker price, early adopters would be better off buying a Tesla Roadster—they’d still have $85,000 left over.) Rather, Terrafugia is spinning the vehicle as a convenient option for pilots who want to be able to fly to any airport—say, Martha’s Vineyard—and then be able to drive to their final destination without having to rent a car separately.

It’s not clear how many potential customers fit that profile. But one key to Terrafugia’s business plan is that in 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration created a new class of pilot’s licenses, for planes that weigh under 1,320 pounds and fly slower than 138 miles per hour—so-called special light-sport aircraft. Getting a sport pilot certificate to fly one of these planes takes half as much training as qualifying for a traditional private pilot license, which could greatly expand the potential market for planes like the Transition.

Already more than 40 people have put down deposits of $10,000 each to hold their place in line for a Transition. Dietrich said at today’s conference that the first production craft will be ready for customers in 2011 (a year later than previously projected).

Terrafugia is a neologism from the latin words for “land” and “escape.”

Live blogging from the press conference:

Phil Meteer: “All seven landings were very smooth touchdowns. The cockpit has outstanding visibility of the runway environment.”

“Something made me want to take off again, so Carl had to chase after me in the chase truck.”

“Ninety percent of the total program risk is in the first flight and we’re past that, so Terrafugia has taken off in more ways than one.”

Q&A:

What’s next for Transition? Dietrich: Delivery of first vehicle will be in 2011. The manufacturing process is expected to create hundreds of jobs. “With this accomplishment Terrafugia is poised to usher in a new era of general aviation.”

Meteer: Vehicle has been through two rounds of wind tunnel testing but we have to validate it. “It will graduate when we’re convinced it’s performing as designed and ready for the next stage.”

Dietrich: “We have already begun design work on the next prototype.”

Meteer: “This design is very safe. Bring it back to the first airplane flight….there is risk. If you talk about fear — I think a bigger danger is that we wouldn’t do something like this out of fear. To me that is more dangerous than getting in there. Risks are things we can manage. We can label them, analyze risk, say ‘No unnecessary risk.’ We can show courage in the face of danger and engage in no recklessness. That’s why it took us 6 months of powered testing to get off the runway.”

Does it have a ballistic recovery system — a rocket deployed parachute? Dietrich: It does. “If you get into trouble you can pull a handle and the entire vehicle will be brought down safely.”

How much will it cost? Dietrich: “The anticipated purchase price is $194,000. We are accepting deposits. The aircraft can be reserved. There have been over 40 aircraft sold already.”

How many does the company have to sell to break even? “That’s proprietary.”

Who are the buyers? Dietrich: “Many are couples, many live in retirement communities and they see this as a recreational vehicle that allows them to visit their families.” Some business users. A mix of customers. International as well.

Does the propeller disengage on the ground? Dietrich: “Yes, it switches to wheel drive exclusively.”

What were the biggest challenges in developing this vehicle? Dietrich: “There are a lot of regulations that govern air traffic and a lot of regulations that govern pilots. We have a small team with limited resources and making sure that we abide by all those regulations was a significant challenges.”

Describe your feelings the first time you took it into the air? Meteer: “You realize that being in the at 100 mph is better than being on the runway. It was remarkably unremarkable. It was almost humorous. It flies like an airplane. There is another part of that — as a tester you learn to put your feelings aside. The feelings don’t really come out until after.”

Continue to page 2 for videos of the Transition’s first flight.

…Next Page »

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Boeing is cutting about 10,000 jobs this year, or 6 percent of its workforce, according to chief executive James McNerney. The news was announced in a conference call this morning. Boeing cited decreased revenues and the global economy as reasons for the cutbacks, which will occur through a combination of layoffs, retirements, and attrition. More than half of the losses will be in Washington state, according to the Seattle Times.

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Paul Allen just got a new addition to his Flying Heritage Collection of vintage aircraft. Yesterday, the Paine Field facility in Everett, WA, held a media event in which the museum hoisted a full-scale replica of SpaceShipOne to the ceiling. Just thought Xconomy readers would be interested to see these photos (courtesy of Jennifer Bragg and Adrian Hunt).

SpaceShipOne was funded by Allen and received the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004 as the first low-cost, civilian, manned spacecraft launched into suborbital flight (to an altitude of around 100 kilometers). The craft, and its replica, were built by Mojave Aerospace Ventures and Scaled Composites. The original ship is on display at the Smithsonian in Washington DC.

Back in August, Luke took a tour of the Everett hangar facility, which opened to the public last June. It looks like the SpaceShipOne replica will feel right at home, as it is placed near the collection’s ME-163, the world’s first operational rocket-propelled aircraft—an inspiration to the design team of SpaceShipOne.

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In the heart of Cambridge, MA, a few blocks from the MIT campus and across the street from the missile-guidance labs at Draper Laboratories, there’s a 10-story brick office building with a brand-new corporate logo near its crown. It’s the ITA Software building, and the LED-backed logo, with its distinctive airplane-tailed @ sign, was switched on for the first time last Thursday, December 11. Scores of ITA software engineers ventured briefly into the freezing rain to watch the official lighting, then retreated back inside for a champagne toast and a slide show documenting the logo’s installation.

The lighting ceremony, the champagne, and the accompanying speeches were a bit out of character for ITA, which has never been the type of organization to call attention to itself. But for the MIT-bred company, which invented the software that hundreds of thousands of people use every day to buy airline tickets online and which has quintupled in size to some 500 employees over the last four years in order to complete a massive new airline-industry project, the ceremony was a brief moment of self-congratulation.

Jeremy Wertheimer, ITA’s co-founder, president, and CEO, invited me back to his office after the champagne for a rundown on the company, which I’ve been meaning to profile ever since we ran a piece one year ago that described its unconventional campaign to recruit brilliant programmers. The campaign included ads on Red Line trains with Googlesque puzzlers like “Write a program to compute the sum of all the integers between 1 and 10¹¹ both divisible by seven and, when the decimal digits are reversed, are still divisible by seven.”

For all I know, Wertheimer wrote that one himself. He’s got a PhD in computer science from MIT and a huge picture of artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky on his wall. He’s won numerous CEO-of-the-year-type awards from high-tech organizations around Massachusetts, and, in one of the largest single venture capital deals in New England’s history, he talked a syndicate including Battery Ventures, General Catalyst, Spectrum Equity, PAR Investment Partners, and Sequoia Capital into investing $100 million in ITA in 2006.

Under Wertheimer’s leadership, ITA has also figured out how to make money in an industry—the airline business—where consistent profits have been elusive. The company’s first big product, and still its anchor, is QPX, the system you see when you shop for tickets at the websites of airlines like Alaska, Alitalia, American, Continental, Hawaiian, United, and US Airways, or when you go to airfare comparison shopping sites like Orbitz, Kayak, Farecast, CheapTickets, FareLogix, Hotwire, Sidestep, or Cleartrip. Whenever you search for flights on one of those sites and get a matrix of itineraries and prices sorted by departure time, airline, or price, it’s QPX under the hood. When ITA licensed QPX to airlines and other ticket distributors, it had the foresight to charge not by the installation but by the transaction—meaning part of the price of nearly every airline ticket you buy online goes to ITA.

Clients are happy to pay ITA’s fee, because QPX doesn’t just show options to ticket purchasers, but balances a staggering number of variables behind the scenes—such as seat availability and demand on various routes—to help the airlines set the most effective price for each seat. “If you look at the way people bought airline tickets about 16 years ago, there was no good way to even say ‘What is the cheapest way to get from here to there,’ because it wasn’t required back in 1960,” when the first computerized airline reservation systems were designed, Wertheimer explains. “You needed to have somebody new come along, who didn’t have a pre-existing system. That was what we did. We solved the hard problem of how to sell this perishable good—an empty seat that, by the time the door closes on a flight, is worth nothing—at the highest price somebody is willing to pay at any given moment. And it turned out that everybody wanted that.”

Now the company has embarked on its big second act. QPX helped the airline industry reinvent the ticket purchasing process and save massive amounts of money on live sales agents and travel-agent commissions. But the company’s new all-encompassing reservation system, code named Polaris, touches almost everything else an airline does, from tracking frequent-flyer mileage and issuing reward tickets to automatically rerouting passengers and bags waylaid by weather or mechanical problems. It runs on PC architectures instead of mainframes, uses standard SQL databases, incorporates Web-style interfaces, is built around Internet-based communication protocols, and is generally designed to bring airlines fully into the Web era.

“The airline industry computerized early, in the early 1960s, because it was difficult to see how you could run a thing with millions of passengers and thousands of connections every day without having a broad computer system to tie it together,” says Wertheimer. The first such computer system, called SABRE, was developed by IBM and adopted system-wide by American Airlines in 1964. The system gave American a huge advantage, and was quickly copied by the other airlines. Incredibly, though, the code written by IBM is still at the heart of all four of the main airline reservation systems in use today. And despite the advent of systems like QPX, the limitations of the legacy systems make it very difficult for airlines to …Next Page »

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Leave it to Paul Allen to create a museum that flies. Literally. This Saturday afternoon in the skies above Everett, WA.

Okay, the museum doesn’t really fly, it’s an aircraft hangar that remains on terra firma. The part that flies is most everything inside the museum, which the billionaire with omnivorous interests calls his Flying Heritage Collection. It’s composed of 15 World War II-era fighter planes that Allen has assembled from around the world over the past decade, polished up, and restored to FAA-certified flying condition.

Aviation fans can marvel at the roaring engine of the P51D Mustang, or imagine the danger pilots of other planes faced when performing night bombing raids over Berlin or London. But the larger question Allen is raising with his collection is an even more fascinating one, for me, anyway: What ingredients are necessary to make big leaps ahead in innovation? After all, this short historical period from 1935-1945 saw planes go from propeller-driven to the era of jet engines. Speeds went from 60 mph to 600 mph. Wood and fabric were replaced by all-metal body frames. Radar went from concept to mainstream. How did those stars align so quickly?

I drove up to Paine Field on a rainy Wednesday afternoon to see for myself and meet Adrian Hunt, the executive director of the Flying Heritage Collection. Since it opened in June, the flying museum has apparently been something of an instant hit. More than 11,000 people have already visited, the type of attendance figure that organizers thought it would take six months to eclipse, Hunt says.

Apparently, people are drawn to the living, breathing aspect of the place, where the artifacts don’t sit around collecting dust. Hunt pointed to an eye-washing station on the wall next to an exhibit, and a fire hose. They aren’t props—this is an active aircraft hangar. “That’s not the sort of thing you see at the Seattle Art Museum,” Hunt says. He adds, “It’s important that these are restored to flying condition, so people can experience the power, the engines, and the noise.” (The public can’t hop on board, the planes are flown strictly by professionals.)

By taking a close look at each plane, you can see the step-by-step advances aviation made in those formative years. Allen’s exhibits credit the leaps in innovation to six main themes, which you can see etched on the wall before you enter the hangar. The first is political will, defined by government leadership and public support, which the museum says was “driven by ambition or the need to survive.” (I’ll go on a limb and say that’s a more powerful motivator than stock options).

But political will alone wasn’t enough. For one, the means and manufacturing capacity from capital and labor had to be in place. For another, the support technology like weather instruments needed to mature. More precise weaponry had to be developed. Of course, engines had to evolve with greater horsepower to fly longer, higher, and faster. Then fuselage and wing materials needed to get stronger and lighter in order to make planes safer and more nimble.

Even though I’m the biotech guy at Xconomy, it made me think there’s got to be some lesson here for my corner of the world. Maybe it’s the next flu pandemic that mobilizes political leadership and public support around vaccine research, which could be the catalyst to propel us to a new era of disease prevention after decades of immunology research. Then again, if we aren’t already laying the right foundations in research, maybe we won’t be equipped to make such rapid leaps in a time of crisis. That’s something to think about when the 70-year-old planes rumble in the skies over our modern high-tech mecca this Saturday afternoon.

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The idea of a drivable vehicle that also flies has a firm grip on the public imagination. Woburn, MA-based Terrafugia, the subject of two highly popular Xconomy stories back in May (here and here), showed its prototype “roadable aircraft,” the Transition, to big crowds at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture show in Oshkosh, WI, from July 28 to August 3. And on Monday Fox News ran an interview with CEO Carl Dietrich (see the video below, which includes a cool computer animation of the Transition coming in for a landing).

Terrafugia’s main innovations are a folding wing system that allows the Transition to fly like a light sport aircraft, land at any airport, fold up its wings, and hit the road—as well as a carbon-composite body that’s light enough to fly yet strong enough to meet highway crash-test standards. The $140,000 vehicle is being marketed to pilots who want the convenience of being able to reach their final destination (say, a ski resort) without having to park their aircraft and rent a car.

Seeing the youthful Dietrich on TV prompted me to contact him for an update on Terrafugia’s progress. “We continue to be on track to fly by the end of this year,” Dietrich said in an e-mail. However, he stated, the date of the Transition’s maiden flight has not yet been scheduled.

Sadly, press and other spectators won’t be invited to witness the Transition’s actual first flight, “for safety and security reasons,” according to Dietrich. But the company plans to send out an announcement when it’s ready for the first public flight.

Here’s the video:

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Right now, if you want to zip through security lines at major airports you have three basic options: travel at weird hours when few people are in the airport; shell out big bucks for a first-class ticket (provided the airport has a separate line for first class); or sign up for a Clear pass (or a similar pass from a competing company) that verifies your identity and makes it easy to get through lines at a growing number of airports around the country.

Although option 2 sounds nice, option 3 is probably the most practical and affordable. Right now, Clear is offered at some 18 airports—none of them named Logan or Sea-Tac (in Xconomy’s home cities). But it might be coming to those airports soon. And to help Clear expand to more locations, faster—as well as non-airport venues like sporting events—Boston’s Spark Capital has taken the lead in a $44.4 million investment in the New York-based security firm, the companies announced today. Syncom Venture Partners also joined the round, as did repeat investors Lockheed Martin, Baker Capital, GE Security, and Lehman Brothers. With the new funding, Clear has raised a total of $116.4 million.

Clear works on an annual membership basis. Enrollment starts online, where you provide some basic biographical information. Then, if you receive government approval for the program, you are invited to a Clear center (they currently operate in 11 states), where you must provide two forms of government-issued identification (a passport and driver’s license, say) and then have your fingerprints and iris images captured—and your picture taken. Only then do you pay your $128 annual membership fee, and in return you get a Clear card that allows access to special security lanes, where your identify is verified biometrically.

Clear, with some 200,000 members, claims its lanes are 30 percent faster than regular security lanes, and according to the release, the company “plans to improve that even more through enhanced technology which, once approved by the US Government, could allow cardholders not to have to remove shoes, outer garments or laptops as they pass through the security checkpoint.”

Right now, Clear has two main competitors, FLO Corp. and Vigilant Solutions, according to a spokesman. The cards from the three programs all work at the same special security lanes. Clear plans to use its new cash influx to recruit more members in its current markets and also expand to new markets around the U.S..

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Soon, transatlantic flights may no longer be a safe haven from the daily grind of e-mail and the Web. AeroSat, an aviation communications company based in Amherst, NH, has developed a broadband antenna system that could allow passengers to connect to the Internet, use cell phones, and watch live television while flying.

AeroSat’s technology can do more than just send data between a single airplane and the ground. Aircraft outfitted with these antennas can also link to each other, transmitting the broadband signals between themselves across the ocean and down to ground stations, without using satellites.

AeroSat claims that it will take only nine ground stations along the coasts and seven aircraft over the ocean (at any given time) to provide broadband coverage the whole way across the Atlantic. Even ships can link to the network as long as they have an airplane in their line of sight. According to the company, this proposed transatlantic network would be more than a thousand times faster than today’s standard satellite service and operate at a fraction of the cost.

Investors seem to think the idea of an AeroSat network is clear skies ahead. Earlier this week the company announced that it has received $14 million in new funding, from existing investors CAI Managers & Co. and AeroEquity, and a new investor, Boston-based PAR Capital Management. The money will go into expanding AeroSat’s product line and production capacity.

“Our growth in the past five years has been dramatic—we have more than quadrupled our workforce, and we are expanding our production capacity tenfold,” said CEO Michael Barret in a press release. To make room for the volume production, the company will move its production and testing to new, larger facilities in Nashua, NH, in August.

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Stamford, CT-based Hexcel (NYSE: HXL) announced today that it has landed a multi-year contract to supply carbon fiber composite materials for Airbus’s planned A350 XWB long-range planes. The award, which spans all A350 XWB aircraft produced through 2025, is expected to generate revenues of between $4 billion and $5 billion, Hexcel said.

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OK, we’re big on robots around here. From iRobot’s landmark court case to Kiva’s shuffling warehouse bots, from the FIRST (For Inspiration & Recognition of Science & Technology) high-school robot competition to Hydroid’s Navy contract for robot submarines, we’ve been covering the business of bots in depth and on the ground since our inception. And why’s that?

Well, for one thing, robots are just cool. They capture our imagination like few other technologies do. Robots are R2-D2 saving the day, the Terminator delivering one-liners in an Austrian accent, and Iron Man flying through the air, guns ablaze. It’s why anyone ever got into the business in the first place.

What’s more, the greater Boston area has clearly established itself as one of the world’s leading centers for robotics. There are more than 150 companies, institutions, and research labs that deal in robots or robot components here. That adds up to more than 1,500 workers, $150 million in government contracts, and $250 million in annual sales, according to the official state organization presiding over it all—the Massachusetts Robotics Cluster, which is a subgroup of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, a non-profit that fosters entrepreneurship and promotes tech companies.

Not that it’s necessarily a boom time for robotics firms. Everywhere you look, budgets are tight. “It’s a bit tough for early stage companies,” says Paul Coster, an analyst at JPMorgan who watches iRobot. “Very few have viable business models.” To be successful in today’s climate, he adds, it’s becoming more important “to roll up and come to market with a proven model.”

With this state of the robotics union firmly in mind, we wanted to provide the definitive local guide. Following our stories on the greater Boston Internet video cluster and the hidden hub of music and technology, we wanted to track down every commercial outfit doing significant work in robotics—everything from mobile to medical robots, software to hardware, electromechanics to exoskeletons. We drew the line if the company made sensors, electronics, or energy sources that could be used by robots, but did not focus primarily on robot products.

Looking at the list, a few things leapt out at us. The majority of firms (at least 13 out of 24) get substantial support from defense contracts, while most others serve niche markets. Local companies are strong in mobile robots and vehicles, growing in medical robots, and not as strong in industrial applications. We’ve also included a couple of non-companies—organizations that we feel are making a direct impact on the industry. But this is by no means a comprehensive list. If we’ve missed something, please leave us a comment below or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com.

We’re also working on putting together a networking event to bring the local robotics community together to talk about the pressing issues, and maybe raise a few of our own—like what are the potentially transformative applications for robots in society that nobody is thinking of? In the meantime, enjoy our guide…

Aurora Flight Sciences
Cambridge, MA
Vertical take-off unmanned aerial vehicles for defense and aerospace applications. The company is headquartered in Manassas, VA, but established an R&D center in Kendall Square in 2005.

Barrett Technology
Cambridge, MA
Best known for its WAM (Whole-Arm Manipulation), a state-of-the-art robotic arm, used for rehabilitation and manufacturing applications such as spray-painting. It might even be used to help repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Barrett began in 1990 as a spinoff of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Black-I Robotics
Tyngsborough, MA
Incorporated in 2006, Black-I develops unmanned ground vehicles for security and defense. Its robots have been tested by the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad at Logan Airport for detecting and disrupting car bombs.

Bluefin
Cambridge, MA
Autonomous underwater vehicles for detecting surface mines, and other defense applications using sonar and hydrophones. The company was spun out of MIT in 1997, and became a subsidiary of Battelle Memorial Institute in 2005.

Boston Dynamics
Cambridge, MA
Founded in 1992 out of MIT, Boston Dynamics focuses on human movement simulations and legged robots that can walk and run over rough terrain. A recent YouTube video of the company’s remarkable Big Dog quadruped robot has attracted millions of viewers—and generated a hilarious parody. …Next Page »

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We know our readers love to hear about radical new technologies and the business opportunities they create. So we weren’t shocked when our article last week about the Transition, the drivable airplane from Woburn, MA-based Terrafugia, turned up on Slashdot and brought more visitors to the site than any Xconomy story since our launch last summer (and temporarily brought down our Web server in the process).

But we were a bit surprised by the comments that readers left here and at Slashdot—the majority of which were critical, even dismissive, of Terrafugia’s concept as a viable business proposition. Given that “flying cars” have been fodder for sci-fi movies, cartoons, and Popular Mechanics covers since the 1930s, it’s understandable that some people feel jaded about the latest promises for airplane-automobile hybrids. But whether or not you’re personally interested in traveling in an airplane with folding wings that doubles as a road-worthy automobile, quite a few private pilots are—as the three-year waiting list for a Transition demonstrates.

Judging from the comments last week, many commenters hadn’t fully absorbed the factual points in the article (to put it politely). Others seemed to feel that because the concept of a car-plane hybrid has been on the drawing boards for so long, it must be inherently flawed. But if you hear out the prize-winning aerospace engineers at Terrafugia, you’ll begin to understand why they feel so certain that current-day materials and electronics make a roadable aircraft—one that’s safe both to fly and to drive—a feasible idea.

In the spirit of friendly debate, we boiled down the hundreds of comments to a dozen basic criticisms, then asked Carl Dietrich, Terrafugia’s CEO and co-founder, to respond to each one. The text of our conversation follows. Please keep in mind that the questions below represent our summaries of the most commonly registered criticisms. They don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of Xconomy or its editors.

Xconomy: Thanks for speaking with us again so soon. The first and most repeated criticism of Terrafugia’s work that we heard from readers last week went like this: “Just look how many bad drivers there are on the roads. Being a pilot takes much more skill than driving. So just imagine the havoc if lots of drivers had flying cars.”

Carl Dietrich: This is one of the most common misconceptions about the Transition. People assume that since we’re building a roadable aircraft it must be a flying car, and therefore will be sold to everybody who drives a car, and that’s just not the case. The vehicle will be sold to licensed private pilots and sport pilots, and these people will have gone through significant training in order to operate a vehicle like this. And they will hold a completely different type of license [from a driver's license]. It’s not something where there is going to be one of these things in every garage. It will be a rarity to see one of these vehicles for the foreseeable future. So you’re not going to turn around one day all of a sudden and see the skies blackened with thousands of Transitions. The real market for these vehicles is solidly in the hundreds of units per year. For cars, you’re talking hundreds of thousands of units. It’s a very different scale. This is an airplane first, and not a replacement for anybody’s car.

X: Criticism number two: Light aircraft have a higher fatality rate per passenger mile than cars.

CD: The absolute number of accidents and fatalities in light aircraft is substantially smaller, of course, than in automobiles. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were correct that accidents and fatalities per passenger mile are somewhat higher. But the things we’re doing to address those issues are what I think is important. There is a market for general aviation, so the question is what can we do to make it better, to make it safer. And I believe we’re doing a lot to make it safer.

Specifically, not only do we have this rocket-deployed parachute that can …Next Page »

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Don’t call it a flying car. It’s a “roadable aircraft.”

It’s named the Transition, and the first full-scale model is taking shape inside a former machine shop on an industrial back alley in Woburn, MA. Between now and late July, the 10 employees of angel-funded startup Terrafugia will be spending “a lot of long days, nights, and weekends” in that shop, says CEO and founder Carl Dietrich. That’s because they want to show off their concept vehicle at AirVenture—the world’s largest aviation festival, held annually in Oshkosh, WI—and there’s a lot of work to finish first.

When I visited Terrafugia yesterday, technicians were shaping the grooves in the fuselage’s carbon-fiber skin that will hold the straps for the vehicle’s rocket-fired emergency parachute. They hadn’t yet attached the folding wings to the fuselage or the fuselage to the empanage (which will hold up the dual tails), and they had yet to figure out where to put the engine’s exhaust system. “It’s crunch time,” says Dietrich.

And the work won’t end after Oshkosh. Terrafugia wants to deliver the first Transition to a customer by the end of 2009 and go into large-scale production by 2012. If you were just building a new type of plane or a new type of car, that schedule would be ambitious enough. But the Transition is both—and if, as the company intends, pilots are to land the vehicle on an airport runway, fold up the wings, and tool right out onto public highways, then this hybrid-of-a-different-color will have to meet federal standards for both aviation safety and highway safety.

Which means going through the demanding certification processes set up by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Then there are problems like building fail-safe folding wings that can be verifiably locked into flying position; making the vehicle light enough not only to fly, but to qualify as a Special Light-Sport Aircraft (of which more below); working with insurance companies to create a new kind of policy combining the accident insurance required for automobiles with the hull and liability insurance required for airplanes; and finding new investors with the stomach for the kinds of risks Terrafugia is taking.

In other words, there are a thousand practical obstacles to achieving the flying-car dreams Deitrich says he’s had since he decided to become an aerospace engineer at the age of 8—-to say nothing of actually making a bit of money along the way. “The old joke is that the best way to make a small fortune in aviation is to start with a large one,” says Dietrich. But while he admits that building a plane that you can also drive “sounds off the wall,” he says “there is a real business case for investing in its success. I’m personally invested, as are a lot of the people here. I don’t see any way we’re not going to get this done.”

There’s plenty of reason to take Dietrich seriously. The 30-year-old earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT, and was awarded the $30,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize in 2006 in recognition of his groundbreaking designs, including a desktop-sized fusion reactor, a pumpless rocket engine, and a blast-safe pick for removing land mines. Dietrich put the prize money into Terrafugia, which he co-founded with fellow MIT aero-astro grads Samuel Schweighart and Anna Mracek (now his wife) and two former MBA students from MIT’s Sloan School. Their plan to manufacture a road-ready airplane was the runner-up in the business venture category of the 2006 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition—winning the company a $10,000 check that still hangs on the wall of Terrafugia’s “prototype development facility,” a modest space formerly used to manufacture garage doors.

But prizes alone don’t guarantee success. Nor do cool prototypes (though Terrafugia started generating orders as soon as it showed its first folding wing model at Oshkosh in 2006). To succeed as a business, you need a real market. And the key to Terrafugia’s entire business plan was …Next Page »

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