Bob Atac loves to fly his vintage Korean War T-28 U.S. Navy trainer plane because, as one of Atac’s flight instructors likes to say, “They built it before they knew how.”
The same might be said for the $5 million Sugar Grove international avionics company that he started in 1986. Among Atac and his five partners, three of them graduate school buddies, none has an MBA, a background in avionics or international trade expertise, the usual prerequisites for success in today’s global market.
Their company, Flight Visions Inc., has what Atac, 33, calls a split personality. To explain, he pointed out the model of a camouflaged Egyptian fighter jet that sits on a bookcase in his office. Across the room, on the wall, is a picture of a gray and blue Ecuadorian search-and-rescue helicopter. Egyptian bombardiers and Ecuadorian rescue squads employ Flight Visions’ high-tech equipment called a heads-up display, or HUD, unit.
Atac admits that neither the international military nor rescue helicopters were the markets he and his partners originally planned to target when they set up shop in second-floor offices above a hangar at the Aurora Municipal Airport in Sugar Grove. They had a product–an improved electronic landing-assist system that Atac had started developing for general aviation while an electrical engineering graduate student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign–and a game plan.
The corporate jet market would be their No. 1 focus.
But international events, specifically the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of the Eastern Bloc countries, intervened. Eastern Bloc air forces were clamoring for low-cost HUDs, and Flight Visions had the only one on the market. (Low cost is a relative term, though, as Flight Visions’ HUD sells for $100,000, compared to about four times that amount for the company’s competitors.)
“We had no plans of becoming an international business,” Atac said. “We were thrown right into the fire, but quite honestly I think we’ve been very successful at it.”
Today, with its international business going strong, Flight Visions once again has its sights set on the 8,000-strong U.S. corporate jet trade.
For years corporate pilots have been looking for equipment to take the guesswork out of the most dangerous part of the flight, said Atac. Such heads-up display units, which project vital information onto the plane’s windshield so the pilot can keep his eyes on the runway rather than the cockpit gauges, have been standard equipment on American military planes for years. But no one had come up with an affordable unit small enough to install in general aviation, rescue helicopters or military training planes. Not until Atac set his sights on the task.
Atac’s fascination with flight was fueled by the memory of watching the first Apollo moon landing with his father, Muzaffer Atac, a high-energy physicist at Fermilab. Bob Atac was an electrical engineering undergraduate looking for a job when he first came up with the idea of developing a low-cost HUD.
On a job interview with a Ft. Worth flight simulation group, he was shown a heads-up display unit in operation. “I thought, hey, that thing is pretty neat. We ought to be able to have them in private airplanes,” he said.
Returning to the University of Illinois as a graduate student, he started tinkering with the idea in the Advanced Digital Systems Laboratory of University of Illinois electrical engineering lecturer Ricardo Uribe.
Uribe remembers Atac as “one of my excellent students. By himself he pushed this idea of developing the flight simulation (the precursor to his HUD), which attracted many students to want to work with him. He used computers designed to be used in one way in an entirely different way.”
Mark Phillips, one of Atac’s fellow U. of I. project lab denizens and now vice president of Flight Visions, recounted it was “over a couple of beers at Bullwinkle’s in St. Charles” that he and Atac decided to start Flight Visions.
On a tour of its Sugar Grove facilities, where the collegial flavor of a university science lab still reigns, Atac showed off a HUD. It’s an aluminum canister, weighing about 11 pounds, with the highly sophisticated electronics that activate the heads-up display unit tucked inside.
When installed in a cockpit, the canister is hidden behind ceiling or sidewall panels. Only a thick glass lens about the size of a slice of rye bread snaps into place about a foot in front of the pilot’s eyes. Focused at infinity, the electronically activated lens reports the plane’s vital signs: its altitude, pitch, horizontal and vertical speed and feet from the ground, among other information. The pilot sees the images on the lens clearly even though his eyes are focused thousands of feet away on the approaching runway.
To explain its operation, Atac pointed out another wall photograph: a cockeyed view of the Chicago skyline with an overlay of green icons that makes it look like the newest virtual reality game. It was a pilot’s-eye view of a HUD approach to Chicago’s Meigs Field (see photo on Page 1).
The HUD’s most innovative feature is a velocity vector, which no other on-board instrument provides. “Here’s where the HUD shines,” said Atac, scrambling up the steps of his company’s twin engine turbo prop plane for an on-board demonstration.
“When you learn to land a plane, you spend most of the time understanding your landing glide path. How fast am I going down? Am I going to hit the runway? Am I going to have to add power to make it onto the runway? . . .
“What the velocity vector does is give you an aiming mark for the airplane,” he said, pointing to the bull’s-eye on the HUD display. The pilot positions the bull’s-eye at the end of the approaching runway, then tries to keep it there even though heavy winds may buffet the plane, altering its anticipated course. Without the HUD, a pilot lands by guesswork, albeit guided by experience.”
Indeed, the Flight Safety Foundation reported in its 1991 Flight Safety Digest that 31 percent of accidents “might have been prevented or positively influenced” by heads-up guidance systems such as Flight Visions’ HUD.
Others in the general aviation industry are equally enthusiastic about the new low-cost equipment. Mary Silitch, managing editor of Professional Pilot magazine, said, “It enhances safety immensely.”
To Myron Collier, a retired corporate pilot for Pittsburgh-based Cyclops Corp., a manufacturer of steel alloys, Flight Visions’ HUD system is “a big advantage in basic safety. Imagine if you’re making an instrument approach and have your eyes focused on the instrument panel and then suddenly you break out of the clouds and have to refocus to a visual reference to effect a landing. With the HUD you’re already looking straight out through the windshield. There is no transition. You break out, your eyes are adjusted, all the numbers that are needed to go visual are right there in front of you.”
HUDs are not new. Based on World War II technology, “they’re basically glorified gun sights,” said Atac. “During the war, the gun sights were focused at infinity so when you were dogfighting you could line up an aircraft without bringing your eye focus inside.”
But Atac and his partners have advanced its design significantly since then. “We’re not the first to try this. But we’re the only company that has been successful at it so far” at low cost, he said.
Flight Visions’ unit was designed to be affordable, compact and usable for the retrofit market, unlike competitors’ models. “We win the competitive battle by having a price that is so aggressive that we are very difficult to ignore,” Atac said.
Flight Visions has another competitive edge. It’s at least a year ahead of competitors in seeking Federal Aviation Administration approval for its HUDs, which must be approved for each of approximately 20 airframe designs to make a significant dent in the U.S. corporate jet market.
Atac admits he has learned how to run a business “by the school of hard knocks.” Company treasurer Hart Gately “has spent the last 10 years trying to teach me how to read a balance sheet.” He winced when he thought about some of their early mistakes, such as the $80,000 they lost because a would-be investor “was really out to make money for himself rather than for the company.”
“I remember coming back on the train from Chicago (after the final meeting with the investor) and saying, `It’s as if we just got our MBAs and it only cost us $80,000,’ ” Atac said of the experience. “That was a heap of money, so high we couldn’t imagine how we’d ever recover.”
But recover they did.
Today Atac and his wife, Louise, live in Batavia with their 6-month-old daughter, Sarah. They love to fly in the T-28–which Atac owns in partnership with Mark Phillips–along Chicago’s lakefront at dusk to watch the sun go down.
But the sun is definitely rising for Flight Visions and its staff of 35. Projecting annual gross sales of $30 million in five years, Atac thinks it’s fun to consistently win coveted contracts against huge names in international business such as Honeywell and England’s GEC Marconi.
Atac may not have known how to build an international avionics company when he started 10 years ago, but his vision is no longer blurred. Today prospects for his company, like its No. 1 product, are focused on infinity.
