BOOK REVIEWS

Keene Sentinel, "Going up against the big guys"

http://www.sentinelsource.com/articles/2010/08/08/features/books/free/id_408535.txt

By STEVE SHERMAN
Contributing Writer

Published: Sunday, August 08, 2010

“Sacred Skies; The Quest or Playing Frisbee in a Minefield!” by Lance S. Parkhurst. 407 pages. $29.95.

The deep-seated human impulse to invent things takes precedence over the exhausting struggles that inventors often face. In our modern society, the independent mind that invention requires confronts the opportunist mind that steals profitable ideas. Stealing inventions comes through corporate power, industrial espionage, legal ambushes, intimidation, forgeries, injustices and other means of theft.

Few inventors document these confrontations with a detailed book of their struggles; Lance Parkhurst of Jaffrey writes of one of them. In “Sacred Skies,” he tells of electrical engineer Bob Pilley and his wife Lois, co-owners of Deering System Design Consultants, and their modern day tale of an inventive David fighting the corporate/government Goliath.

The first battle took place in the 1980s at the outset of a national competition to develop what would become the civilian GPS (Global Positioning System) navigation program. Tragic airline accidents involving the deaths of hundreds of passengers had prompted a call for Federal Aviation Administration improvements and lucrative contracts.

Parkhurst writes that Pilley became highly involved in this FAA safety research work. Bob and Lois, he writes, “later demonstrated the world’s first GPS-based airport navigation-surveillance and air traffic control capability in 1993. For the first time, airport air and ground operations for navigation and traffic control were ‘seamless’ — no longer limited by the range or coverage of a navigation or radar system.”

This was considered a tremendous step forward for aviation over the many independent systems that had provided localized single function navigation and surveillance capabilities.

Today satellite positioning devices, more effective and safer than ground-based radar systems, provide aircraft identity and a precise three-dimensional positioning, Parkhurst writes.

Pilley turned his research into nine U.S. patents posted on the back cover of the book. Inside, Parkhurst lays out a complicated report of an inventor facing corporate espionage and usurped duplications of his GPS-related inventions that have worldwide applications in the global markets of aviation.

This is a story of persistence, family stress and a valiant example of what independent inventors face, of how those who follow the impulse to better a venal world can have the last word.

 

 

Nashua Telegraph, "ENGINEER'S STORY IS NO INVENTION"

Nashua Telegraph: http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/788019-196/engineers-story--is-no-invention.html

David Brooks Tuesday, July 6, 2010

I think it’s safe to say that every engineer has had this nightmare at some point in their career, although hopefully they haven’t actually faced it:

You’re working on a big project for a company when you realize that a new technology could do the job cheaper, better, faster – an engineer’s dream.

You and your spouse break off, create your own business and, through ingenuity and pluck, demonstrate the technology. You mortgage the house to pay for patents and machinery, get some press coverage, draw interest from folks in the government and industry-leading firms. Everything is rolling along.

But slowly the dream turns sour as opposition builds from industries and government agencies whose livelihood is threatened. Delays and costs mount, lawsuits arise, and your business and finally your personal life fall apart.

Two decades later, the old technology is still being used and your efforts are forgotten. As I said, a nightmare.

This depressing story arc fills “Sacred Skies,” a self-published autobiographical novel by Bob Pilley of Jaffrey, who in the late 1980s worked as a contract engineer for Sanders Associates, long before Lockheed and then BAE Systems owned the iconic Nashua company.

“Sacred Skies” tells the story of Pilley, an electrical engineer, and his first wife Lois, a software engineer, as they tried to create an airport control system based on GPS instead of radar and microwaves. This was back in the early 1990s, when the geo-location technology was so new that “most companies couldn’t even spell GPS,” as Pilley puts it.

Even today, satellite-based navigation is only part of the complex system that tells airplanes where they are as they fly from point to point and, more importantly to Pilley, after they’ve landed at an airport. The Federal Aviation Administration is slowly developing a system they call NextGen to digitize the whole air-traffic-control system and let it use GPS, but that remains in the future.

“You have GPS in your car that tells you when to turn into Dunkin’ Donuts, but a $100 million aircraft depends on signs and paper charts,” said Pilley during a recent interview.

Pilley thinks he and Lois were on the road to a NextGen-like system back in 1990, when he hired a plane and filled it with leased Maganavox equipment to create a geo-location map of what was then just called Manchester Airport, flying out of the old Hammond terminal building.

That cutting-edge work had its genesis when he and Lois were hired at Sanders in 1983 as part of a five-year proposal for an upgrade to the FAA’s air control system – an upgrade that never even mentioned GPS. After Sanders and its partners lost the contract, the Pilleys decided to develop a GPS system on their own.

“When you’re trained in something, you follow the work. I needed to look for a new career, and decided this is a promising technology,” he said.

Although his writing experience was limited to technical papers and a massive report for an airport-control commission headed by then-Vice President Al Gore, Pilley decided to tell the story as a novel under the pen name Lance Parkhurst, featuring himself and Lois as characters, with the names of most other people changed even while the organizations, from Boire Field to Lincoln Labs, remain intact.

He did this partly for personal reasons: “Writing in third person helps isolate you from the emotion. That’s therapeutic.”

But there is also a business reason, since it broadens the book’s appeal to potential buyers.

Notably, writing a novel allowed him to focus on the effect the long battle had on his on family life. At one, for example, Pilley was distracted during an important flight test because Lois was in Concord Hospital giving birth. “I’m there and I don’t know if I’m a dad or not yet, because cell phones weren’t invented,” he recalled.

These personal notes add to the sorrow as the Pilleys are stonewalled or worse – at one point, Pilley believes their tests near Crotched Mountain were observed by a government helicopter – and as the struggles grow, eventually breaking up their marriage

“I was pretty bitter when we lost the house,” he said. “I guess I was naive.”

And things get worse. “Sacred Skies” ends in the 1990s; Pilley is writing a sequel that details the resulting fight, including an unsuccessful patent lawsuit against the FAA. The failure of this suit prompted him to start writing “Sacred Skies” two years ago.

The question you probably have at this point is the obvious one: Can an autobiographical novel written by an engineer be any good?

Happily, “Sacred Skies” is quite readable. Pilley handles dialogue well, not an easy task, and having been a journal-keeper for years, he’s got the timeline down pat.

There might be more detail than I really wanted – “Sacred Skies” is almost 400 pages long – but that’s why we learn to skim when we learn to read.

Particularly for engineers, it is an object lesson that might well be worth checking out.