Touch of Gray - December 2006

Engineer gets kicks from flying his airplane designs

Engineer gets kicks from flying his airplane designs
   Tom Purcell of Carolina Meadows loves airplanes.

   He loves to design them, build them, display them -- and fly them.

   We're not just talking about the many scale model airplanes that are displayed inside his house and garage, but two full-size single-seater seaplanes that Purcell designed and built in his spare time while working full-time in the aerospace industry. He keeps the planes in a hanger near Lake Gaston.

   Purcell has flown the planes many times over lakes Gaston, Jordan and Waccamaw. His most recent flight was in October when, at age 86, he flew the Flightsailer over Lake Gaston. Some 50 camera-wielding onlookers recorded the event.

   Born in Hope Mills, Purcell received a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from N.C. State and a master's in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan. Fascinated by aircraft since boyhood, Purcell has made aerospace both his career and a life-long hobby that continues on in retirement. He still builds airplane models and makes improvements to his seaplanes.

   "I designed my planes so that they could be put on boat trailers and towed to lakes and air shows," Purcell said.

   Indeed, he last displayed the Flightsailer in October at the Petersburg, Va., Fly-In.

   Purcell holds patents on the flex-wing design that enables the wings to fold up for storage and transport. Last year he was awarded a patent for the unique tail design.

   "The wings' surfaces furl into compact packages so that no large-wing panels are exposed to the battering of wind gusts from passing traffic," Purcell said. "I arranged the tail surfaces so that no external braces were needed, yet they could deploy into a firm structure."

   The Flightsailer is an outgrowth of Purcell's experiments to develop a cargo glider for military use. Its bottom is like a boat hull while his other plane, the Sea Sprite, is fitted with pontoons.

   Purcell spent two years building the Flightsailer in his garage and basement while living in Raleigh in the mid 1980s. He constructed the fuselage of fiberglass-covered Styrofoam, and filled the hull bottom with sufficient Styrofoam to ensure flotation in the event of an overturn. It works well, even in choppy water. A 40-horsepower Rotax 447 tractor-type engine on top of the fuselage powers the 687-pound (gross weight) plane. It can support a 200-pound pilot with ease.

   Articles and accompanying photos have appeared in Sport Aviation magazine (1996) and Experimenter magazine (2003.)

   As for Purcell's scale-model airplanes, they grace his living room, hallway and garage like pieces of sculpture. He constructed a Navy Grumman fighter just by looking at drawings in The Model Airplane News. It is mounted on a stand, trailing a plastic tube "jet stream" out of a large "cloud" of Dacron fiberfill.

   Perhaps most unusual is an "automobile plane" Purcell designed that would allow the plane to land on its three wheels on a runway, fold up its wings and then keep on going down the highway.

   Purcell joined the ROTC in his junior year at N.C. State, receiving his degree and commission in 1943. "You can imagine my joy when I was sent to Wright Air Field in Dayton, Ohio, home of the Wright Brothers," Purcell said. "There I met many of aviation's pioneers."

   Courtesy of the Army, he received his master's from the University of Michigan and served as project officer for the design, construction and testing of helicopters. Sections of those early rotor blades sit atop several of his living room tables.

   Purcell came to Raleigh in 1953 when he joined the Exide Corporation and began designing specialty batteries for missiles and spacecraft. That's when he made his mark on the moon.

   "I designed and patented a terminal seal for the battery of the Surveyor, the first unmanned spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon," he said. "It had to power the vehicle on the moon's airless surface under extremes of heat and cold."

   Upon retirement, he became a consulting engineer who specialized in designing equipment that had to operate under extreme conditions. "This included emergency generators, the size of locomotive engines, for nuclear power plants that would be ready to start up and begin operating in ten seconds -- even in the middle of an earthquake," Purcell said.

   Purcell moved to Carolina Meadows in 1995. There he found other aircraft enthusiasts among the residents.

   Bill Moffitt, a native of Greensboro, earned a Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal with 12 clusters during World War II. As a bombardier and navigator, he flew out of England and France in 1944-45.

   Ed Kastner, a Midwesterner, was trained as an aircraft mechanic and pilot on the Lockheed Jet Star, Viscount, and Fan Jet Falcon. He ended up in Winston-Salem as maintenance chief and pilot for R.J. Reynolds.

   Purcell's two children are in the area. His daughter Kathy Linthicum is a supervisor of the Wake County School nurse program. His son, Archie Purcell, is president of FGI (Focus Group Inc.) a marketing group in Chapel Hill. -- Rita Borden

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