Yellow Pages
ANACORTES — It wasn’t a bird. It wasn’t a plane that the BMW Oracle Racing sailing team trucked away from here last month.
That doesn’t mean it won’t fly.
The team’s baseball diamond-sized America’s Cup trimaran now has a wing instead of a cloth sail. The 190-foot-tall wing is by far the largest wing ever created, and it was made here in Skagit County, said New Zealander Tim Smyth, the team’s construction manager.
He said the boat has gone up to 40 knots and that its speed can triple that of the wind. When the boat is moving fast, two of its three hulls lift into the air, hoisting the crew high above the water’s surface.
It took 20 weeks and about 20,000 hours of work to create the wing, which was built in parts here with help from Janicki Industries, carefully trucked to San Diego in early October and assembled there over the past four weeks, according to Smyth.
“Whether or not you realized it at the time, this is one of those projects that come along once in a lifetime,” wrote Jim Payant, Janicki Industries vice president of marine, energy and transportation tooling, in an e-mail to staff this week.
Janicki created the tooling, or molds, used to construct the final wing, but Payant said that during construction many employees did not know what the massive and time-sensitive project was. It went by the code name Kopis.
Payant said by e-mail that when BMW Oracle puts in an order, he knows it will require the company’s undivided attention.
“Because our role is to build tooling we are at the beginning of the process,” he wrote. “When we take on these kinds of projects, failure comes not only to us but to anyone downstream. This means that the project teams have to execute the work as quickly as possible, correctly and because of the sensitive nature, without a lot of chatter to the outside world.”
He called Janicki Industries the American team’s “weapon” against Alinghi, who must build in their home nation, Switzerland, not known as a hub for aerospace design.
Not only does the Oracle sail look like a wing, it acts like one, said University of Washington Professor Bob Breidenthal, who studies aerodynamics, fluid mechanics and turbulence.
“It is effectively half an airplane wing sticking up from the surface of the water,” he said.
BMW Oracle’s wing sail is nearly 80 percent bigger than a 747 wing. Smyth would not divulge the sail area but did say the 190-foot-tall wing is about 40 feet across at its widest point.
Despite its massiveness, the wing is light and fragile. Smyth, who declined to give the wing’s weight, said it is made out of carbon fiber, aluminum honeycomb, Kevlar and Federal Aviation Administration-certified airplane wing fabric. The team had to be careful not to punch through the fabric, which is heat-shrunk tightly around the rest of the components to provide the wing with a rigid surface, he said.
BMW Oracle — which will sail in the America’s Cup, the world’s most prestigious sailing competition, in February — installed the wing to its trimaran on Tuesday in San Diego and was sailing soon after.
