Local Granby Resident is Pioneer in Helicopter and Wind Turbine Design; Glidden S. Doman to be featured guest at New England Air Museum on March 17th

We walk among greatness, even in Granby, Connecticut!  I suspect few of us know that local Granby
resident Glid Doman is an engineer who has pioneered two seemingly diverse but
related areas:  the design of
helicopters, and the design of wind turbines.

I have the pleasure of knowing Glid through my
association with the New England Air Museum. 
When I met Glid a few years ago, I was surprised to learn that someone
of his accomplishment lived in my little town.

And so were a few others. 
Last year, the New England Air Museum put on display his Doman LZ-5
helicopter along with an exhibit detailing Doman’s story.  “My local pharmacist called me to tell me
she’d recently taken her kids to the Museum and was surprised to learn about my
background,” Glid told me.

Glidden Sweet
Doman was born in Syracuse, New York in 1921.  Living in the small upstate New York village
of Elbridge, he came from a family of inventors and entrepreneurs.  His father Albert and uncles Lewis and George
Doman were the first to provide electricity for Elbridge in 1890.  Glid's elder half-brother Carl T. Doman
designed air cooled Franklin engines for Franklin automobiles and for aircraft,
including for the pioneering Sikorsky VS-300 helicopter.

Glid's
engineering capability and creativity was evident early on. In his teens he
built motorized "go carts" and an aerodynamically streamlined soapbox
derby racer, winning him the regional race held in Syracuse when he was 15.  He would move on to place well in the
national championship race in Akron, Ohio. He also attempted to build an
airplane, completing much of the fuselage, but was never able to obtain an
engine for it.

In 1938 he
enrolled at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) College of Engineering,
where he majored in aeronautical engineering.  He joined the flying club, became president of
it, and met his future bride, Joan Hamilton, a fellow flying club member. Glid
completed all the training and flight hours necessary for a private pilot’s
license, but never actually obtained the official license.  Joan, the only woman in the club, did obtain
her private pilot’s license.  During WWII
she would later be invited by the famous aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran to join
the Women Air Service Pilots (WASPs), but she declined the offer.

Not long after Glid’s college
graduation, his brother Carl invited him to attend a Society of Automotive
Engineers meeting in New York where Igor Sikorsky was a featured speaker. From
this Glid became interested in helicopter rotors. Helicopters were still a very
new invention, and the rotor blades suffered quickly from fatigue.  A Sikorsky YR-4 had recently experienced a blade
fracture during a delivery flight to the Army, stimulating Glid's interest all
the more. In August 1943 Glid and Joan were married and moved to Stamford, Connecticut,
where the young 22-year old engineer went to work for Sikorsky in Bridgeport,
Connecticut.

At Sikorsky during WWII, Glid participated in intensive
experimentation and flight testing, making considerable improvements in the
helicopters’ blade life.  His contributions were so vital that Igor Sikorsky himself
appealed to the draft board to keep Glid on the test program.  Glid discovered that the design of the rotor
hub was the real cause of the blade failures, and for the duration of the war,
he ran a program to match and balance the blades of all the Sikorsky helicopters
before they were delivered. All the while he was learning more about rotor
dynamics.  He didn’t find all the
answers right then, but became intrigued by questions no one else was asking.  In 1945 he left Sikorsky and founded his own
firm to pursue them.

Partnering with Sikorsky
colleague Clinton Frazier, the newly-formed Doman-Frazier Helicopters Inc. began
work in a Stratford, Connecticut cow pasture. 
Frazier would leave the partnership three years later when Doman
Helicopters moved to Danbury, and eventually would win contracts with the U.S.
Army and Navy and draw potential commercial customers on four continents for
the next 20 years.  The company consistently
innovated solutions decades earlier than larger competitors, some of which are
now standard in today’s helicopter technology. 

The driving force behind Doman engineering was sharp
focus on understanding what

the helicopter and especially its blades and rotor hub were doing.  The resulting insights produced the firm’s
hallmark trait – aeronautic design with almost elegant simplicity.

The YH-31/LZ-5 Doman
helicopter was the company’s final and most successful design.  It was extensively tested and received
certification for both military and commercial use. The helicopters toured the
U.S. and were well received by potential customers, but the company was unable
to raise the venture capital necessary to set up an assembly line to produce
the helicopters in significant numbers.  Thus
Doman helicopters were a technical success but not a commercial success.  The company diversified beyond helicopters,
adapting to keep the doors open, but was
forced to close in December, 1969, after 24 years.

Glid would spend the next few years with the Boeing Vertol
Helicopter Company designing rotors for the “Heavy Lift Helicopter” and performing
other rotor research.

In 1974, after 30 years in the helicopter world, Glid
Doman turned his rotor knowledge from flight to wind energy with breakthrough
concepts in wind turbine design.  With
the growing price of oil, wind energy was an appealing market for growth.  For some 30 more years, he led the design
evolution of wind turbines for major manufacturers on two continents, including
United Technologies, Boeing, and Aeritalia. 
In January 1978 Glid moved to Granby and became Chief Systems Engineer
of the wind energy program at Hamilton Standard.  Drawing on his extensive knowledge of rotor
dynamics for both helicopters and wind turbines, United Technologies / Hamilton
Standard designed and built two of the largest wind turbines ever built up to
that time. 

As oil prices dropped in the mid-1980’s, U.S. interest in
the wind turbine market declined; but there was still strong international
interest, so in 1987 Glid went to Italy to head up the design of the large
Italian Gamma wind turbine.  Back in
Granby in 2003, he formed a new company, Gamma Ventures Inc, to market the
production rights for the Gamma turbine. He has since teamed up with a British
company that is working to place very large wind turbines based on Glid’s
designs on off-shore platforms.  When
(if) these turbines are built and installed off the coasts of multiple
continents, it will be an example of rotor technology going global in a
different application, after its beginnings with Igor Sikorsky’s first
helicopters and Glid Doman’s testing of them more than 60 years ago, followed
by the development of rotor dynamics knowledge with Doman helicopters and later
with the wind turbines.

Today Glid resides in Granby and recently marked his 92nd
birthday. He is still innovating, remaining thoroughly engaged in business and
technical strategies and analysis toward achievement of the goal of superior
wind turbine performance at less cost through the use of the rotor technologies
he developed.  He is also active in
supporting the New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, where two
of his helicopters – the converted Sikorsky/Doman R-6 and a Doman YH-31/LZ-5
--are on display.  Of the original
half-dozen companies in the U.S. helicopter industry, he is the last company
founder still alive in 2013.  He is one
of the few helicopter pioneers to have transferred rotor dynamics technology
from helicopters to wind turbines. The hope is that one day wind-generated
electricity will be produced in great quantities, much less expensively than
now, using the advanced rotor technology concepts developed by Granby’s own
Glidden Doman.

At the Museum’s Open Cockpit Sunday planned for March 17,
Glid will be available to meet with visitors to talk about his experiences.

(Susan R. Orred is
a Granby resident and the Director of Development and Marketing for the New
England Air Museum.  The author thanks
both Steve Doman and Bob Sperry for their research contributions to this
article.)