It is something when you can look at a trophy on the mantelpiece and know that you share the honor with the likes of Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle and Bill Lear. This week that honor, the NBAA Meritorious Service to Aviation Award, given to those who have advanced aviation with their extraordinary contributions, was awarded to aerospace innovator Joe Clark, chairman and CEO of Aviation Partners, Inc. (API) and chairman of the Aviation Partners Boeing joint venture, for his pioneering of blended winglet and, more recently, split scimitar winglet technology.
Blended winglet modifications on jets have saved operators more than 5 billion gallons of fuel according to API, all while enhancing aircraft performance. Clark is accepting the 2015 NBAA Meritorious Service to Aviation Award this week in Las Vegas, Nevada, during NBAA 2015. “Joe Clark is an aviation visionary and a true entrepreneur,” said NBAA president and CEO Ed Bolen.
Clark started flying lessons in college. He was lucky to have a friend in Clay Lacy, who invited him to travel to the Reno Air Races aboard a Lear Jet in 1964. That may have sealed Clark’s fate in aviation (it certainly fueled his passion). By 1966, he’d founded Jet Air, the first Lear dealership in the Northwest. He was subsequently named vice president of sales for aircraft modification specialist Raisbeck Engineering. By the1980s he moved into airlines, teaming up with Milt Kuolt to form regional carrier Horizon Air, which later became part of Alaska Airlines. Clark didn’t forget his business aviation roots, however, forming Avstar to market used military business jets as general aviation aircraft.
Efficiency and speed were always on Clark’s mind. He cofounded API in 1991 with Dennis Washington and hired Dr. Bernie Gratzer to lead a phalanx of noted retired Boeing and Lockheed aerospace engineers to develop and market winglet modifications for business and commercial aircraft. The idea of winglets reducing drag caused by wingtip vortices had been around for a long time, according to Gratzer, but it took the team at API three years of collaboration to crack the code on an efficient, lightweight design that made economical sense for retrofitting, a huge part of API’s initial market for the product.
It worked. By 1995 and 1996, Clay Lacy and Clark were proving it, setting records for speed and performance in Lacy’s API winglet-equipped Gulfstream II. The company has supplied blended winglets to thousands of aircraft since then, including GIIs, Boeing Business Jets, a dozen types of Boeing airliners, Hawker 800s and 800XPs and several Falcon Jet models.
Eventually API formed a joint venture with Boeing as Aviation Partners Boeing to retrofit the entire Boeing fleet with blended winglets.
“In founding API, Clark brought together the brightest minds in aerospace engineering and helped develop advanced technology to improve aircraft performance and minimize aviation’s impact on the environment,” said Bolen. “We’re proud to recognize him with NBAA’s highest honor, the Meritorious Service to Aviation Award,” he said. “Like past recipients, his achievements have advanced the technology of flight.”