Peter C. Masak (August 17, 1957 – May 22, 2004) was an

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the limit ...

, inventor, and

glider pilot Glider may refer to: Aircraft and transport Aircraft * Glider (aircraft), heavier-than-air aircraft primarily intended for unpowered flight ** Glider (sailplane), a rigid-winged glider aircraft with an undercarriage, used in the sport of glidin ...

. He graduated with a

Bachelor of Applied Science The Bachelor of Applied Science, often abbreviated as B.AS., BAS, BSAS, BASc, B.A.Sc., or BAppSc, is an undergraduate degree. There are also ''Bachelor of Arts and Science'' and ''Bachelor of Administration Science'' undergraduate degrees, also a ...

degree in

mechanical engineering Mechanical engineering is the study of physical machines that may involve force and movement. It is an engineering branch that combines engineering physics and mathematics principles with materials science, to design, analyze, manufacture, an ...

in May 1981 from the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates ...

, Ontario, Canada. He earned his glider pilot license at the age of 16 and his power

pilot license Pilot licensing or certification refers to permits for operating aircraft. Flight crew licences are regulated by ICAO Annex 1 and issued by the civil aviation authority of each country. CAA’s have to establish that the holder has met a specifi ...

at the age of 18, the minimum ages for both. Peter was a Canadian soaring record holder and represented

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

and later the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

in the

World Gliding Championships The World Gliding Championships (WGC) is a gliding competition held every two years or so by the FAI Gliding Commission. The dates are not always exactly two years apart, often because the contests are sometimes held in the summer in the Southern ...

. He logged almost 2000 hours of glider flight time. He was living in West Chester, Pennsylvania with his wife Adrienne and their three children when he died.

Winglets

In 1987, Peter Masak, worked together with

Mark D. Maughmer Mark D. Maughmer (born January 18, 1950) is a professor of Aerospace Engineering in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. He is a widely published author known throughout the world as one of the leading aero ...

, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the Pennsylvania State University, to design

winglets Wingtip devices are intended to improve the efficiency of fixed-wing aircraft by reducing drag. Although there are several types of wing tip devices which function in different manners, their intended effect is always to reduce an aircraft' ...

for his racing

sailplane A glider or sailplane is a type of glider aircraft used in the leisure activity and sport of gliding (also called soaring). This unpowered aircraft can use naturally occurring currents of rising air in the atmosphere to gain altitude. Sailpla ...

to improve performance. Others had attempted to apply Richard T. Whitcomb's

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

winglets to gliders before, and they did improve climb performance, but this did not offset the parasite drag penalty in high speed cruise. Masak was convinced it was possible to overcome this hurdle. By trial and error, they developed successful winglet designs for

gliding competitions Some of the pilots in the sport of gliding take part in gliding competitions. These are usually racing competitions, but there are also aerobatic contests and on-line league tables. History of competitions In the early days, the main goal wa ...

. At the 1991

Uvalde, Texas Uvalde is a city and the county seat of Uvalde County, Texas, United States. The population was 15,217 at the 2020 census. Uvalde is located in the Texas Hill Country, west of downtown San Antonio and east of the Mexico–United States bord ...

, the trophy for the highest speed went to a glider with Masak's winglets. Masak went on to win the 1993 U.S. 15 Meter Nationals gliding competition using winglets on his prototype Scimitar sailplane. The Masak winglets were originally retrofit to production sailplanes, but within 10 years of their introduction, most high-performance gliders were equipped from the factory with winglets. It took over a decade for winglets to first appear on a production airliner, the original application that was the focus of the NASA development in the 1970s. Yet, once the advantages of winglets were proven in competition, adoption was swift with gliders. The point difference between the winner and the runner-up in soaring competition is often less than one percent, so even a small improvement in efficiency is a large competitive advantage. Many non-competition pilots installed Masak's winglets for the handling benefits as well. The benefits are notable, because sailplane winglets must be removable to allow the glider to be stored in a trailer, so they are usually installed only at the pilots' preference. Today, following on the work of Masak and Maughmer, new glider wings are designed concurrently with the winglet, achieving higher efficiency than retrofitted winglets, with drag less than the theoretical minimum for a fully elliptical wing of the same span.

Scimitar sailplane

Peter Masak was the designer and builder of the Scimitar sailplane prototype, based on the

Schempp-Hirth Ventus The Schempp-Hirth Ventus is a sailplane produced during 1980–1994 by Schempp-Hirth, a German sailplane manufacturer. It was designed by Klaus Holighaus and replaced the Schempp-Hirth Mini-Nimbus. Schempp-Hirth manufactured 613 Ventus sailp ...

. It employed many of his design modifications, including a completely new

wing A wing is a type of fin that produces lift while moving through air or some other fluid. Accordingly, wings have streamlined cross-sections that are subject to aerodynamic forces and act as airfoils. A wing's aerodynamic efficiency is e ...

and

tailplane A tailplane, also known as a horizontal stabiliser, is a small lifting surface located on the tail (empennage) behind the main lifting surfaces of a fixed-wing aircraft as well as other non-fixed-wing aircraft such as helicopters and gyropla ...

. The

composite Composite or compositing may refer to: Materials * Composite material, a material that is made from several different substances ** Metal matrix composite, composed of metal and other parts ** Cermet, a composite of ceramic and metallic materials ...

wing used a flexible

S-glass Fiberglass (American English) or fibreglass (Commonwealth English) is a common type of fiber-reinforced plastic using glass fiber. The fibers may be randomly arranged, flattened into a sheet called a chopped strand mat, or woven into glass cloth ...

torsion box A torsion box consists of two thin layers of material (skins) on either side of a lightweight core, usually a grid of beams. It is designed to resist torsion under an applied load. A hollow core door is probably the most common example of a torsi ...

spar SPAR, originally DESPAR, styled as DE SPAR, is a Dutch multinational that provides branding, supplies and support services for independently owned and operated food retail stores. It was founded in the Netherlands in 1932, by Adriaan van Well, ...

, with stiff

kevlar Kevlar (para-aramid) is a strong, heat-resistant synthetic fiber, related to other aramids such as Nomex and Technora. Developed by Stephanie Kwolek at DuPont in 1965, the high-strength material was first used commercially in the early 1970s a ...

skins. "We get superior twist characteristics as a function of speed," Masak claimed. And the soft bending "reduces the local angle of attack during gusts to better keep the airfoil in the laminar-flow range." The wing chord was optimized continuously along the entire span, dispensing with typical straight-tapered sections. It won the Design News magazine Unique Airplane design contest in 1995. The Scimitar featured an acoustic

boundary layer In physics and fluid mechanics, a boundary layer is the thin layer of fluid in the immediate vicinity of a bounding surface formed by the fluid flowing along the surface. The fluid's interaction with the wall induces a no-slip boundary cond ...

flow control system to prevent

laminar Laminar means "flat". Laminar may refer to: Terms in science and engineering: * Laminar electronics or organic electronics, a branch of material sciences dealing with electrically conductive polymers and small molecules * Laminar armour or "band ...

boundary layer

flow separation In fluid dynamics, flow separation or boundary layer separation is the detachment of a boundary layer from a surface into a wake. A boundary layer exists whenever there is relative movement between a fluid and a solid surface with viscous f ...

, using a smaller, more highly cambered airfoil with a greater

lift coefficient In fluid dynamics, the lift coefficient () is a dimensionless quantity that relates the lift generated by a lifting body to the fluid density around the body, the fluid velocity and an associated reference area. A lifting body is a foil or a com ...

. "It's always good to have laminar flow," says Masak, "but you'd rather have turbulent attached flow than laminar separation." He flew a later version of this glider, with factory built Ventus 2 wings, in the 2004 U.S. 15 Meter Nationals gliding competition being held at Mifflin County Airport, the same contest he won 11 years earlier. While flying a competition task, he crashed in a syncline fold in the

Tussey Mountain Tussey Mountain is a stratigraphic ridge in central Pennsylvania, United States, trending east of the Bald Eagle, Brush, Dunning and Evitts Mountain ridges. Its southern foot just crosses the Mason–Dixon line near Flintstone, Maryland, run ...

ridge, a few miles south of the village of

Alexandria, Pennsylvania Alexandria is a borough in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 388 at the 2020 census. Geography According to the United States Census Bureau, the borough has a total area of , all of it land. Demographics As of th ...

at . He was attempting to cross the ridge line upwind, and encountered sinking air and turbulence in the lee of the mountain crest, resulting in an inadvertent stall/ spin. The crash was not survivable, and he was killed on impact. In his glider, he installed an

Emergency Locator Transmitter An Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) is a type of emergency locator beacon for commercial and recreational boats, a portable, battery-powered radio transmitter used in emergencies to locate boaters in distress and in need of ...

(ELT), although it was not required. The wreckage was found in less than 24 hours, even though it was in steep terrain in a remote forested water-shed area, not visible from the air. As a result of this accident, and the subsequent search and rescue, ELT's are now required in many gliding competitions.

Soaring accomplishments

*He earned FAI 1000 km diploma number 82 on April 30, 1987 by flying 1006.99 km in a Schleicher ASW 20A from

Ridge Soaring Gliderport Ridge Soaring Gliderport was a public-use glider airport located two nautical miles (4 km) southwest of the central business district of Unionville, in Centre County, Pennsylvania, United States. It was privately owned by Knauff & Gro ...

. *The

Soaring Society of America The Soaring Society of America (SSA) was founded at the instigation of Warren E. Eaton to promote the sport of soaring in the USA and internationally. The first meeting was held in New York City in the McGraw–Hill Building on February 20, 193 ...

awarded him the Exceptional Achievement Award in 1995.

Publications

In 1991, he produced a booklet titled ''Performance Enhancement of Modern Sailplanes'' which described not just the theory, but the art of performance modifications, including winglets. In it, he credited Dick Johnson, Wil Schuemann, George B. Moffat, Jr. and

Richard Schreder Richard E. Schreder (25 September 1915 – 2 August 2002) was an American naval aviator and sailplane developer, responsible for design and development of the HP/RS-series kit sailplanes marketed from 1962 until about 1982. Schreder also fou ...

for their pioneering work that inspired him.

Patents

Peter Masak was a prolific inventor, and he appears as inventor on 17 U.S. Patents, mostly in the area of

applied in the

petroleum industry The petroleum industry, also known as the oil industry or the oil patch, includes the global processes of exploration, extraction, refining, transportation (often by oil tankers and pipelines), and marketing of petroleum products. The large ...

. * – Apparatus for agitated fluid discharge * – Method for removing a deposit using pulsed fluid flow * – System and method for NMR logging with helical polarization * – Method and apparatus for nuclear magnetic resonance measuring while drilling * – Temperature compensated magnetic circuit * – Magnetic resonance fluid analysis apparatus and method * – Pressure reading tool * – Method and apparatus for nuclear magnetic resonance measuring while drilling * – Temperature compensated magnetic field apparatus for NMR measurements * – Method and apparatus for nuclear magnetic resonance measuring while drilling * – Method and apparatus for nuclear magnetic resonance measuring while drilling * – Inverse vertical seismic profiling using a measurement while drilling tool as a seismic source * – Inverse vertical seismic profiling using a measurement while drilling tool as a seismic source * – Integrated modulator and turbine-generator for a measurement while drilling tool * – Mud pump noise cancellation system and method * – Method and apparatus for measuring the quality of a cement to a casing bond * – Pump jack slant wells

References