Logic + Imagination = Success.

By Karen

Gad Shaanan is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Unmanned Aerospace.  I was excited to meet him because he loves flying machines, as do I, and because he has an approach to life that resonates with the principles that guide Lustre.

Gad began his industrial design career a long time ago, and has over the years designed all kinds of things, some of which you probably use.

Gad Shaanan is an entrepreneurial visionary with a thirty five year record of creating winning products for internationally recognized, mass-market brands; from medical to mass transit, kitchen gadgets to cellular. You might recognize his work best in products such as the WD-40 Smart Straw, and the Spider Boot, an anti-mine boot, displayed in the MoMA.

Gad’s love of flight began early, and he has always enjoyed designing flying machines–the most recent being a completely reimagined rotorcraft.

Passionate about aviation from an early age, Gad has built, modified, and piloted remote flying machines his entire life. After years of researching gyrocopter flight dynamics, and in collaboration with a team of experts, the GH technology was born.

His latest company is located in an airfield, where he gets to be part of the flight community every day, designing and building his newest flying machine.

That’s a good thing to the Israel native, who said he loves “everything that flies.”

“The funny thing is, even in my youth, I preferred designing planes over flying them,” he said.

Unmanned Aerospace designs hydrogen-powered rotorcraft. When Gad decided to come up with a reimagined form of rotorcraft, he concluded it was necessary to start from scratch. Not for him tinkering around the edges. He put aside prior designs, and began at the beginning.

Unmanned Aerospace wasn’t born from the idea of building a better rotorcraft, it was born from the belief that the helicopter could be radically reimagined. That we could create an aircraft that’s not only capable, but clean, quiet, reliable, scalable, field-serviceable and adaptable enough to meet the real-world demands of both military and industrial environments.

Gad looked to the past as well as the future as he engaged in radical change.

Despite creating a drone for the future, Shaanan looked 100 years into the past to gyrocopters of the 1920s.

“When a gyrocopter is in full flight, it is auto rotation, which saves a lot of energy,” he said. “Two thrusters keep it moving. Once in flight, it can do everything a helicopter can do without the complexity of a helicopter. So I invented a mechanism that can add vertical lift to a gyrocopter and designed it from the ground up.”

So what was the result? Gad’s new rotorcraft can be thought of as (relatively) simplified unmanned aircraft that fly high and fast with light payloads, are easily and (relatively) inexpensively renewed, and are sustainable. They are most likely to be used for resupplying ships far out at sea. Importantly, like the best tech, they are cute. You can see one here, or in the picture above of me and my new friend.

So far as I could tell, Gad has absolutely no plan to retire. If the impulse ever strikes, which seems unlikely, I suspect he will just start another company.

Gad’s approach spoke to me. Those of us redesigning retirement are not tinkering with what worked for an entirely different time, when retirement lasted a few years and R & R was the main objective, and was for people who had an entirely different experience of work. People retiring today, especially Lustre Ladies, want something completely new, because we are totally different in so many ways from those first retirees. Working around the edges of the existing retirement model will not get us where we want to go. We need to design a model that is radically reimagined for the women of the twenty-first century, who are blessed with an unprecedented life phase–the third demographic dividend. We are starting from scratch, but, with the benefit of both decades of experience to inform our logic, and our well-exercised imaginations, we are designing a retirement that is as effective–and good looking–as one of Gad’s new aircraft.

Like Gad, we think Albert Einstein had it right: 

Logic will take you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere