November 09' update: My invited Point of View paper "Silicon is About to Change the World -- AGAIN!" was published in the IEEE's  PROCEEDINGS magazine.  Click HERE to read it.

April 09' update: I hit 70 on March 28, 2009.  To celebrate my 70th birthday I did a rather crazy challenge, which I called the 70at70.

In short: My 70th birthday just happened to coincide with the Old Goats 50 mile trail race in the Cleveland National Forest. I am not nuts enough at this age to try to run 50 miles of mountains in one day, but I knew I could run 70 miles in three days.  The plan was to run 20 miles on Friday; 30 on race day; and a final 20 on Sunday to reach the 70 total.  I exceeded my goal by running 78.38 miles.  Total climbs were 19,698'!  The picture at the left is with my daughter Michelle and grand daughter Sierra.  They brought that special 70at70 celebration cake to the Day 3 finish line.

Story and pictures from each day at:
www.CaliforniaOldGoats.com/70at70ResultsSummary.htm

THE CALIFORNIA COMMUTER
In the early 1980’s, Doug set two Official Guinness World Records for high mileage efficiency with his lightweight, streamlined, street & freeway legal California Commuter.

157.192 MPG - gasoline record - LA to SF. Just 2.87 gallons to travel 451.3 miles!

156.53 MPG - diesel record - Anaheim, California to Las Vegas, Nevada.  Just 1.68 gallons of diesel to travel 263.4 miles while climbing 7,993 feet of elevation gains.

My SkyTran invention was featured on the cover of he July 2008 issue of Popular Science   (or their artist's version of what THEY think our pods should look like).  "GREEN MEGALOPOLIS - An eco-savvy blueprint for tomorrow's megacity points the way to fresh air, clean water and traffic that never jams."

Starting on page 49, five more pages have our MagLev SkyTran in the future city art done by a second artist.  Includes a nice paragraph that mentions our company UniModal LLC.  Love their online animation at: www.popsci.com/futurecity/plan.html (SkyTran is the 4th- click on their FLASH animation).

Check out: www.UniModal.com & www.SkyTran.net

Team California Old Goats - Doug (age 70) and Steve Harvey (age 65) are teaming up again in 2010 to run the  Transrockies 6 day endurance trail race in the Colorado Rockies.

They ran it for their second year in 2009.  Transrockies covers a a total of 113.5 miles of trails between 8,000' and 12,600' elevations.  21,000' of total ascents!  Doug again was the oldest competitor.  In the 2009 race, the OLD GOATS beat 24% of the 132 starting teams. 

Details on our 2008 & 2009 Transrockies race with lots of photos at:
 www.CaliforniaOldGoats.com
Race info at: www.Transrockies.com

Inventor/Engineer Doug Malewicki is an Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineer with a MS from Stanford University.  Doug holds a dozen patents on  inventions in the diversified fields of aviation, medicine, transportation and toys.  He has been most recently working on a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) contract to invent better morphing wing aircraft.  2,000 lb UAV's (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) like the Predator - but doing a lot more than simple retractable flaps and leading edge slats to enable them to loiter efficiently doing surveillance over a location for 10 hours.  After sensing & confirming the bad guys, morphing UAV’s will be able to transform and dive down at Mach 0.9 and pull 5 g maneuvers to take out targets.  Will save calling in the F-16 jet jocks and waiting 20 minutes for them to arrive.

 Rest in Peace
Oct 17,1938 - Nov 30, 2007. 

Look, up in the sky, it's the Kite Cycle!
July 4, 2008 - National Hot Rod Association Article
Inside National DRAGSTER by: Phil Burgess

UMAAV’s (Unmanned Morphing Aerial Attack Vehicles) 

Rather than just doing a extensive theoretical aerodynamic and structural analysis for his innovative designs, Doug built and flew Radio Control models of his various morphing concepts with the help of experts in the field. 

Computer generated 3D rendered movies of a typical mission of Doug’s favorite proposed UMAAV, aptly named THE DROID OF DEATH, can be seen at the above UMAAV link. 

July 2005 Doug was the plenary speaker for the DARPA Morphing Aircraft Structures Conference in San Diego.  
Malewicki is also working on some low cost, simple, electric powered UAV’s with high-resolution color video picture quality available from a 9-gram complete transmitting system on board a solid state, gyro-stabilized, flying platform.

FLYING

Doug is a licensed pilot, who worked as a Senior Flight Test Engineer at Cessna’s Military - Twin Division in the late 1960’s.  He was involved in FAA certification flight-testing to document take-off, landing, stall, single engine climb and autopilot failure performance.  He also performed analysis for Cessna’s first business jet - the Cessna Citation.  Doug was the 10^th person ever to fly in the N500CC prototype.  He is shown here, 35 years later - in January 2004, enjoying sharing the cockpit of the Cessna Citation Jet 2 owned & piloted by Doug Schumann (left) during a flight between Connecticut and Florida.  Schumann is owner and founder of P-Q Controls, Inc. - a major Robosaurus sponsor.

In the early 60’s, Doug worked on the Apollo Saturn V - man to the moon program.  As a Senior Structural Loads Analyst he was involved with structural dynamic response analysis on the Lunar module/Service module docking ring structure.  The analysis showed that this connecting ring had to be beefed up to withstand a possible hard-over thruster engine failure.  He also worked on the Launch Escape Abort System doing dynamic analysis and software for the pyrotechnic event that deployed stabilizing canards.  

In the mid 1980’s, he worked as Senior Technical Specialist in Advanced Composites Manufacturing on Northrop’s B-2 Stealth Bomber.  Doug was involved with radar adsorbent composite materials coatings and developed methods to weld preformed thermoplastic graphite composite parts.

ROBOSAURUS – THE FIRE BREATHING, CAR EATING, ELECTROHYDROMECHANICAL, TRANSFORMING MONSTER ENTERTAINMENT ROBOT
GOING ONCE... GOING TWICE...  GONE!  On January 19, 2008 Robosaurus was sold at the famed Barrett-Jackson Auction in Scottsdale, Arizona for $575,000.  MORE

Click HERE to see the Barrett-Jackson Robosaurus IN ACTION video. 

Two of Doug’s USA Patents are for his Robosaurus invention.  He founded Monster Robots, Inc. and was involved in finding all investors and product sponsors.  Doug did all the structural design and engineering (loads determinations, weights and stress analysis). Along with all the electronic, hydraulic and control system packaging and functional testing.  The creature, which was built in 1.5 years, has been doing shows since 1990.  The most recent NDT (non-destructive-testing) inspection of all welded joints was performed at 250,000 miles and showed no weld fatigue degradation.

One man sitting up in the creature’s cranium controls Robosaurus.  Doug had to develop an innovative wearable control system to enable a single pilot to simultaneously control 18 proportional hydraulic motions.  Each hydraulic valve is controlled by a P-Q Control’s Inc. of Bristol, Connecticut computer valve board that converts the simple on-off electrical switch signals given by the pilot in the head into proper proportional fluid flow rates to the various hydraulic cylinders and pumps.

Much of the Robosaurus structural design involved tradeoffs to enable transformation to a legal trailer for hauling the 58,000-pound, fire breathing, beast from show to show.  Robosaurus meets highway size and weight requirements for all 50 States. 

UNIMODAL/SKYTRAN
Doug considers that his most important invention is his 100 mph non-stop, on-demand SkyTran system.  SkyTran can totally eliminate commuter congestion in any city for the same cost as a single line of 15 mph average speed Light Rail through a city.  Informative Channel 7 ABC TV Eye Witness News interview by Steve Alvarez HERE and Los Angeles Times article HERE.

The key to this solid state, personalized MagLev system’s capacity performance falls out of math and physics analysis.  SkyTran will greatly reduce energy used in the transportation of people; eliminate the pollution associated with commuting; greatly enhance safety of personal travel and reduce travel costs.

RB 2000  - PERSONAL ROCKET BELT 
Rocket belt pilot, Bill Suitor, first flew this improved rocket belt in 1995.  Bill flew for Bell back in the 60’s and still holds all the rocket belt speed and distance world records. Click HERE to see a video of Bill Suitor flying the Bell belt in England in 1966.   Click HERE to see the HISTORY CHANNELS great 8 minute rocket belt video.

Doug was hired as a consultant by the RB2000 Texas principals to design the 90% strength Hydrogen Peroxide monopropellant catalyst pack; do the internal flow analysis; size the supersonic nozzles for optimum thrust performance; and calculate the improved flight durations using non-linear analysis. 

(Click HERE for a list of the "Rocket Scientist's" articles on Rockets!)

TRAIL RUNNING

The photo at the left is from the 2009 Shadow of the Giants 50K ultra (34 miles) that is held just outside Yosemite National Park.  The trails go up and down repeatedly between 5,000‘ and 6,500’ elevations.  5,900' of total climbs.  Everyone had to run though that fun creek twice - on the way out and back!  I was 1st in the 70+ age group.  This year I also won first places in age at the Camp Pendleton USA Marine MUD RUN 10K and the San Juan Capistrano 10K trail race.
 
Doug, now 70, also finished 1st place in age at the Saddleback Mountain Marathon trail run in 2009.  He also ran it in 2008,  2007, 2006 & 2003!  It is rated the toughest Marathon in California.  26.2 miles with 5,100 feet of ascents. 

Doug doesn't run many road races, but the 3 generations have a tradition of running the Dana Point Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning.  Daughter Michelle & I ran the 10K and Sierra (now 9) ran the 5K.  4,000 runners in the 10K!  My time of 53:07 earned me a 2nd place in age (was my fastest time since 2002!).  Speedster Sierra's 24:56 time for the 5K was better than all the 9, 10 and 11 year old girls!

OTHER “SEMI” ADVENTUROUS ACTIVITIES

Doug has been doing weeklong backpack trips every summer in the Sierra’s since 1982.  He has been up to the top of Mount Whitney (14,496 feet elevation - highest spot in the contiguous 48 states) four times since 1995 and did it again August 2004 (Pictures). Once a millennium is not enough!  Photo at the summit on his 2000 trip at the left with his best buddy, retired US Marine Major, Bob Johnson.

An avid cyclist, he has ridden the 540 miles from San Francisco to LA down beautiful Pacific Coast Highway 1 five times since 1982.  Great camp sites at the CA state parks! Last did it in August 2008 with relatives from his hometown - Chicago, IL.

GAME INVENTIONS

Doug invented Nuclear War in 1965!  He licensed it to Scottsdale, AZ game manufacturer Flying Buffalo, Inc. in 1972.  This company has been most influential in its long-term success.  Over ½ million games have now been sold. 

 As time passed, the weapons used in the basic game became obsolete, so expansion sets with newer futuristic weapons have been included.
1965 - The original Nuclear War
1982 - Nuclear Escalation 
1992 – Nuclear Proliferation
1996 – Nuclear War Booster Packs
2004 – Weapons of Mass Destruction 
(YES - that is THE DROID OF DEATH on the cover of the new game!)

Doug and his original Nuclear War game
were inducted into the
Adventure Game Hall of Fame in 1998.