Aerospace designer takes on fresh challenge

Former UK Tornado Olympic hopeful and Airbus designer Adam May talks about his new foiling Moth design

So what does a man do when after he has dedicated the best years of his life to getting into the Olympic squad, is dubbed the favourite for a majority of the Olympic cycle but right at the 11th hour fails to make the grade and ends up not getting selected? Suicide? Take up accountancy?

For Adam May, who with Hugh Styles, got roundly beaten out of the Athens GBR Tornado spot by Leigh McMillan and Mark Bulkeley, the tonic to non-selection has come in the form of a new and exciting project - creating and campaigning his own foiler Moth.

Clearly May's new project has set him well on the road to recovery. "It is nice because having done the Olympic thing for many years, it starts becoming a day and you lose a bit of that passion for sailing. It is not quite going through the motions, but you lose that real excitement for the sport and I have got that back by doing something which really does excite me."

May is a qualified aerospace designer who prior to his Olympic campaign worked as a designer for Airbus. Returning from Cadiz last year May brushed off his CAD skills and was investigating whether he could get the same program he used at Airbus to design boats and parts of boats.

"It's amazing. You can run a full 3D model of an Airbus A380 on laptop. I was working on its rear wing structure and you can fly in and through and around it. You can have a little manikin man and you can see if he can reach in through inspection hatches and reach things properly. So the entire thing is built in the computer and you can check all the interference and if you redesign one part, the changes are influenced on to another part..." The only problem was that he was going to have to remortgage his house to get it.

May admits that he has never designed a complete boat before although he did a lot of technical work on the Tornado foils and the systems layouts. Aside from his professional training, May's background unlike a majority of sailors who have come up through one-designs, has been in development classes - the National 12, International 14 and also the Moth - and this he says has given him a greater technical understanding than those coming up just in one designs.

"In 1993 I had a Magnum 5," recounts May of his Moth background. "A friend had one down in Exmouth. I went out on it once and came back in grinning and I bought that boat straight off him. I learned to sail it and did Moths Worlds in 1993 in Highcliffe. I was Junior National Champion then sailing the oldest boat in the fleet, but I just loved the boat. It was brilliant fun."

In 1995 he teamed up with a friend to build two boats for themselves in the May family garage. "That was a great introduction to boat building. We probably got too radical. It was a good lesson in how not to do a campaign. We did a full raking rig, which worked brilliantly but it took a lot longer to build the boat and we did camber reducing sails which are now the standard thing. We did the first version and didn’t have much time to do recutting."

The luff of their mainsail sleeved the mast, like a sailboard's and had special Y-shaped batten end fittings at the mast inside the loop of mainsail - to improve its aerodynamic qualities behind the mast. This is now standard fair in the Moth class. Unfortunately May says he had to sell his Moth to fund his first trip with Hugh Styles to Sydney.

May was attracted back into the class by the incredible images of Rohan Veal hydrofoiling. "I was doing some coaching in Miami recently and one of the Tornado guys had heard I was doing the Moth and so I showed him one of Rohan’s videos and suddenly I had a crowd of 20 people, all Olympic class sailors and coaches, crowded around my laptop going ‘oh my God - wow, that is fantastic’," recounts May. Two others are buying the same kit as May on the strength of seeing the Veal videos despite neither having sailed a Moth before.

At present the situation is that UK Moth sailors have almost no experience sailing foilers whereas the Aussie Moth sailors are very much further ahead having not only refined the gear but also in the case of Rohan Veal the art of sailing them fast around a race track. "What we’ve said is that the Aussies have got a hell of a jump on us" says May. "They have done a brilliant job pioneering this. We have a lot of ideas but we said 'let’s get out there with a pretty standard boat and just go and learn how to sail hydrofoil Moths'." As a result with his design he has not attempted to reinvent the wheel and is buying heavily into Australian know-how.

While he designed the hull and wings for his new Moth the foil package will be the same as Veal uses, with inverted T-foils on the rudder and centreboard and a bow sensor wand all coming from John Ilett's company Fastacraft in Perth ( click here to see the Fastacraft website) while the rig is also from Australia. "It is easy to sit around the computer and start playing away with all the possible stuff, but actually you’ve got to get out on the water and learn about what happens." Once they have learned all they can about how the Aussie gear behaves will they attempt to make their own developments.

The new hull, May says isn't too radical because they wanted a platform that would be definitely on the pace enabling them to concentrate on future hydrofoil and rig development. "We could have gone amazingly radical and said minimum hull size, etc but there are still plenty of people in the class who don’t always want to be on hydrofoils - they would be interested in a new boat and want to be on hydrofoils occasionally. We had a good look at some of the fastest boats such as the Hungry Tiger which has won the last five world championships and a couple of the other fast boats and have come up with a shape that is quite safe with a very narrow hull, U-shaped sections, narrow transoms and a small flare at the deck level and we have dropped the freeboard down a fraction. We then went a fraction narrower and tweaked it slightly more for lighter breeze sailing than perhaps the Hungry Tiger because although we are going to be trying to do it on hydrofoils so we need a fast shape for non-hydrofoiling stuff."

Despite being a development class, the Moths are attempting to keep a lid on costs and are stipulating a one configuration rule for regattas, so sailors won't be able to take their foils off in light conditions. Thus at the beginning of a race series such as the Europeans being held in Portland harbour on 17-23 July, you measure your kit in and that is you set for the week. "That makes it a far better design challenge, because you now have to cope with that 5 knot drifter race and get round in reasonable shape. We are hoping for a nice sea breeze in Weymouth every day..."

The all-up weight of a modern Moth is just 30kg - roughly the same as the wings on an 18ft skiff. May hopes his new boat will be under this. "A Merlin Rocket sailor I spoke was saying he has more lead correctors in his boat than that."

One point of contention in the class is over the amount of buoyancy in the wings, May is going for a more elliptical section tube for the wings and these will be faired into the hull like a 49er rather than strapped to the deck with U-bolts.

While Moths normally have macho Rambo-style names such as the Hungry Tiger, Magnum and Prowler (okay, the Skippy was an exception) May is calling his new design, the Mistress. "It is not exactly PC, but the Mistress because it is likely to take up a lot of our time, be very expensive and we’ll get hurt quite badly in the early stages and she will be a younger lighter and better looking model compared with what you’ve already got."

Gone are the days when Moths were built in paper thin plywood. The Mistress is being built in carbon fibre by Linton Jenkins of Full Force in Devon. Jenkins, who builds National 12s, 14s and International Canoes and sails 14s and Merlin Rockets, will be having the first boat - the plug - before female moulds are built. Hull number three is going to Graham Vials, who like May didn't get the Athens ticket, in his case in the 470. Otherwise May says many of his Tornado friends are interested as well as a number of Merlin Rocket and 49er sailors.

With three sisterships, two Olympic-level sailors and the prospect of carrying out two boat testing, May expects their development to be rapid. He has plenty of ideas.

The present Fastacraft system is ideal for those with boats who want to retrofit foils. Starting from scratch there are neater control mechanisms he says. "The biggest mileage is in refining the control systems - that is where you will see the development for a while. Flat water it is fine, but I think they are quite tricky to sail in waves, and that is where you can get a control system working well. So I’ve been digging out all my university text books on aircraft flight control systems."



While the Fastacraft set-up uses a motorcycle twist grip control for the rudder T-foil, May is particularly interested in another set-up being developed by Ian Ward in Australia and by Andy Paterson in the UK (mentioned in Tuesday's article) that requires no sailor intervention. "That has a canard configuration with just a little surface planing foil at the front that is immersed in the light stuff and then you get lift on it and the bow rises and then because the bow rises you get an angle of attack on the main foil so that lifts you out and then the front foil ends up just planning on the water. If you raise any higher it pivots around that foil and the main foil has less angle of attack and it levels off. So with that system it is completely automatic and it does its own ride height thing so you don’t need to physically do anything."

He gives another example of areas of development - the positioning of the surface sensor in the Fastacraft set-up that could also be critical for different wave conditions. There is also the possibility of solving the light wind situation by having some kind of retracting system. "People might try a half lifting one, enough to reduce a bit of hull drag without the control issues. The great thing is that there are plenty of people in the class who like to do that experimenting," says May.

While the going airborne issue has created hot debate in the class as to whether or not it should be banned for reasons for competition and cost May believes that the introduction of foils is not as dramatic as for example a weight change. You can just go and buy a retrofit foil package from Fastacraft. "It is always a problem with any development class when something new comes along, but that is the great thing about them: there will be a tricky period, but they always move on. The 14 is a classic example. A while back it went wider and taller, but I don’t think the class as a whole has ever been stronger now.

"It is a bit way out but ultimately it is the future of sailing and in a few years it will stable down nicely and everyone will be having great fun on hydrofoils. It is not going to be long before we get the control mechanisms working well and it could be more stable because suddenly you have a metre wide foil instead of a 30cm wide hull. You are dropping from a bit of a height though..."

Quite how the Moths going foiling will reverberate through other development classes remains to be seen. May gives the 14 as an example: "The speed differences are such that you can’t get it fully hydrofoiling upwind but you can downwind, there’s a control issue, the speeds are higher, and the potential for damage is higher and the cost is higher - they are bigger, the loads are higher. My entire hydrofoil kit, everything, will cost the same as a 14 rudder and that is to get the whole boat out of the water." His Fastacraft retro-kit cost just over £1,000.

The question will be who will be the first Moth sailor in the UK to get airborne. May reckons their first boat will be sailing in April. Simon Payne is importing a foiler Moth from Australia that is due to arrive later this month. Then they will have to work hard to get up to Rohan Veal's skill level. "Rohan Veal - he’s definitely the man. He’s got it fully sorted. He’s regularly thrashing other classes now. We’ve been telling the 49er boys down in Weymouth that we’re going to have ‘em," says May.

While the Europeans in Weymouth will be fascinating it is uncertain at present whether any of the Australian foiler gurus will be taking part. If not, then it may not be until the next Worlds in Melbourne that any Brit Moth technology and sailing talent gets to take on the Aussie might.

More photos of the Fastacraft gear on page 2...