Future Craft Flies Thanks to Kiwi Know-how

NZ engineer Bill White has designed an ultra-lightweight engine to power a “back to the future” style mini helicopter for US company AirScooter. Christchurch based company Pegasus Aviation began developing the AeroTwin engine in the 1990s and quickly caught the interest of Australian and US companies including AirScooter. Pegasus eventually collapsed as a company but AirScooter persisted with its sale due to the impressive reputation of Bill White, who made his name in motorcycle racing engines. Former Pegasus director Stuart Pearson, who formed a new company – Motor Corp (PMC) – specifically to manage White’s engineering firm W.L White, hails the AeroTwin engine as a shining example of Kiwi guts and ingenuity. “American companies don’t seem to want to venture into [this] sort of thing,” he says in the NZ Herald. “They would have to hire a dozen experts, each to do a different task. They have a different mindset. We just get stuck in and do everything ourselves where there they seem to do everything by committee … In the States this would have cost $10 million, whereas we do it for less than one.”