Mild-mannered electronics wizard is an international RC flight guru
As a radio-controlled (RC) helicopter launches into inverted flight, at the top of the arc of travel there's a nose-down moment that its buzzing engine hits zero load. In the sliver of a second that there's no air resistence on the prop, engine speed races, driving power through the gears turning the rotor head.
The speed of an engine with a fraction of an inch of displacement soars into the 16,000 to 18,000 rpm range, about seven times the rpms of a family sedan at interstate cruising speed.
Thrust climbs as the geared-down head speed at the prop zips past engineered specs so that in the next moment, as it bites again into the air, the effect of moving a control is super magnified. At an altitude of something under ten feet, a $1,000 craft is nano-seconds away from a fatal crash.
"If you have to think about what you're doing, it's too late," said Michael Prewitt. When he's flying like that, the rest of the world melts away. A fifteen minute flight burns about eight ounces of $13-a-gallon fuel. He burns about a gallon a week.
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Work, sleep, fly. It's a good life, says the globally-recognized RC guru. Taking out his Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), he accessed the list of nations from which fellow pilots have contacted him.
For six years now, his ideas have permeated cyberspace, funneled around the globe like helpful germs at RaptorTechnique.com.
Something of an invisible man in the regular world, he works in the back of Newman electronics, out-thinking whatever broken gadgetry is put before him.
"If you want to talk to somebody who lives to fly, you've got to talk to this guy," Northeast Texas Remote Control Club (NETRC) Pres Stan Dickson said on the eve of the club's upcoming Southern Rotor Classic.
Or, if you're an RC helicopter pilot dismayed by the controversy swirling around use of the high point balancer vs lifting by the fly bar to address nose dipping during forward flight, click on the "flight characteristics" option under the "trouble shooting" button at his 250-page website. Whatever an RC pilot's question, the answers are all neatly filed, indexed by category. Systematic. Organized.
Last year about 1,500 people e-mailed him.
"Most of the time it's just people saying 'thanks,'" he said. Some write from places he's never heard of. One of the messages came from Brunei Darussalam, an oil-rich spec of a nation just north of Borneo. (You can figure out what nation an e-mail comes from by cross referencing domain-name suffixes with an Internet accessible list of abbreviations, he said.)
Not far beneath the surface, there's more than flying going on here.
What's different about him is his passion for ideas above things. Nobody pays to land at his website. Nobody hired him to re-write a couple of product-specific manuals. He just wanted to make them more easily understood. He flies a lot after work because weekends he's usually helping somebody. People drive from adjacent states to fly with him.
"You get a 'buddy box,'" he said, a pair of radio controllers allowing the "instructor" to override the student's controls.
"That way, when somebody's learning, if they lose control I can catch their helicopter before it crashes." Such sessions shy away from the low altitude rush. Whenever you're learning to do something new, he said, it's best to start "about three mistakes high."
While it's not about cashing in, there's a back-side payoff to his philosophy.
"You learn more about the subjects you help people with," he said. "Even if you don't pick up direct knowledge, if you listen to the questions people ask you learn the different ways people perceive things."
He expects anybody he's teaching to share the experience.
For anybody just wanting something fixed, he's not the man.
"I like the people who want to learn," he said, "the people who really want to know how it's done."
Concerning the issue of racing RPM's at moments of zero load, Model Avionics shipped him a RevMax just to get him to try it. Click on his "Product Review" button to find out the advantages of the RevMax over a traditional throttle governor.
It's a fine point, but a relevant one as flying skills advance.
"Just cruising, you run at a head speed of 1,500 to 1,600 rpm's," he said. "When you start increasing centrifugal force with tighter turns and loops, you need power so if you limit the fuel stream with a governor, you limit performance."
The RevMax gizmo employs a PSOC - programable signal something or other.
"I'd have to look it up - it's a micro controller, a computer on a chip," he said, straining to explain this to a simpler mind.
Back in the 80's, his commander at Newman Electronics turned the old full service gas station at Jefferson and 12th into the first cyberspace headquarters of the Geezerplex. Dennis Newman, for example, hooked up the satellite communication stuff at the community college when it was the headline technology of the time. He was ready and waiting when dish TV hit the market.
Still in high school, Michael went to work digging holes to set poles back in the big dish era, work that funded his flat land free-style bicycle habit at the time. A county-fair level exhibition rider, he drifted from bicycles to computers as his post-hole digging job gave him access and something new to learn in Mr. Newman's electronics shop.
As family and friends trailed into the computer age, always needing technical help with which he was becoming proficient, with the coming of Internet communications he began working on the most efficient way at hand to disseminate information.
"Instead of having people calling all the time, I built my first website to address common problems," he said.
Meanwhile, back at the old gas station turned electronics shop, the Big Dish era was fading, replaced by the bolt on the house sized dish. It was a great day.
"No more holes to dig," Michael said.
In the 90's he found radio-controlled flight.
It's been nearly six years since he pulled down his computer trouble shooting web site and began construction of RaptorTechnique.com.
Whipping out his trusty PDA, Michael punched buttons until matchbox rank and file photos of friends and their flying machines appeared on the screen. They're pilots who've come to him for help.
"Like this guy - he flies real helicopters so when he tries overlaying what he understands into RC flight, there's an issue with his point of reference," Michael said, his excitement tangible as he began climbing into a friend's head, listening and thinking to the racing sort of thoughts shaping reflexes, honing toward the nano seconds of flight that provide the biggest thrill.
What's going on there that's bigger than flying is the idea of sharing without thought of reward beyond friends and the bigger thought yet that life's what you make it.
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A week before the helicopter fun fly at the local field east of the Lake Bob Sandlin dam, Michael made an experimental flight, testing a bomb-release mechanism designed with a tiny radio transmitter cannibalized from an out-of-commission control set, constructed of wooden rods, bent wire and a pair of model fuel tanks transformed to bombs - it's a collision of the space age and playground popsicle sticks. Handy duct tape secures it to the helicopter skids.
"We can have a contest at our fun fly. Who hits closest to the target - we'll have to team up a bombardier to run the bomb drop controller with the pilot . . . "
It was a sunny afternoon. Other pilots spread equipment on work benches, adjusting this, tweaking that. The air buzzed with flight, pilots dreaming themselves into cockpits, riding the sky.
Michael Prewitt took a single flight, then went to work, checking the PA system, getting ready for the next week's arrival of his friends.