Ed Underwood’s life of adventure continues with Kestrel Aircraft
Ed Underwood claims that he’s led a “bland” life. Since graduating from Tech with an industrial engineering degree in 1971, Underwood has started hospitals in Saudi Arabia, worked in Bahrain as Saddam’s bombs took flight and opened a Sharia-compliant bank in the Middle East. He casually mentions a time that “I wasn’t sure I’d get out of Nigeria.”
“I haven’t been able to figure out what I want to do,” Underwood jokes about his varied career.
Underwood’s father was a carpenter who built wooden boxcars for the railroad. After going to high school in Virginia, Underwood sent an application to only one college — Georgia Tech.
“My first trip to Atlanta was carrying two suitcases, wearing a wool coat, coming to Georgia Tech,” he said. “I discovered most Tech students don’t wear wool coats and a tie.”
After specializing in health technology at Tech, Underwood worked for Hospital Corporation of America right out of school. When that company got a contract to help open King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in 1975, Underwood jumped at the chance to go overseas.
“There were no skyscrapers and only two supermarkets,” he said. “One of them, you had to cross an open sewer to get to it.”
After coming back to the United States to get an MBA from Cornell University, Underwood went to Cairo to work on a project for Arthur Young & Company. He moved to Bahrain in 1986 as the head of Middle East consulting and later joined Investcorp to work in IT management.
When his late 1990s retirement didn’t stick, Underwood — a former Alumni Association Board of Trustees Executive Committee member — returned to the Middle East to start a Sharia-compliant investment company. It was only after a second retirement in 2005 that he realized what industry most captured his interest.
Years earlier, Underwood had worked for a company that took control of the aviation firm Cirrus Design. Underwood served on the Cirrus board and became friends with its founder, Alan Klapmeier. The two shared a passion for flying and air travel, and they agreed to develop an aviation project together.
They opted to work with Kestrel Aircraft, a British group that had developed an all-composite plane. The Kestrel has a turbine engine and propeller and seats for two pilots and four passengers plus two drop seats. It will fly at about 320 knots and can go about 1,400 nautical miles (Boston to Miami) nonstop.
One unique aspect of the aircraft is its wing shape. The Kestrel’s wings have a scimitar-shaped leading edge, which was optimized for cruise performance.
Klapmeier and Underwood struck a deal with their British partners last year, and Kestrel has since opened a manufacturing plant in Brunswick Landing, Maine, and an engineering design office in Duluth, Minn. The plane is going through a last round of design adjustments that include a more comfortable cockpit and cabin, plus refined aerodynamics. Then it will begin the Federal Aviation Administration approval process.
Underwood and his partners are in the process of fundraising for the project. He said the plane’s customer base will be high net worth individuals, entrepreneurs with broad operations and corporations.
“Corporations can look at it as a second or third plane in their fleet,” Underwood said. “It’s a work horse. And the chairman would be as comfortable in it as he would be in his Gulfstream.”
The Kestrel doesn’t fly as fast as passenger jets, but because it takes off from private airports, the total travel time is less, he said.
And on flights between smaller airports, the Kestrel is a great alternative to major airlines.
“Any time you’re not going hub to hub, we’re beating the socks off the airlines,” he said. “It’s going to be cost effective next to our competitors. It competes favorably with business travel.”
Kestrel will begin taking deposits on planes next year with a planned manufacturing launch in 2014.
Underwood has co-piloted the Kestrel and reports, “It was a lot of fun, a lot like a fighter jet.”
After bouncing through so many careers, Underwood said he finally settled on aviation for a simple reason: it’s fun.
“It has very interesting people. They’re adventuresome,” he said. “They’re very bright people. And the engineers realize that customers are putting their life in their hands.”
Underwood understands that from experience. He recalled a situation during the Persian Gulf War, when his company finally demanded that he leave Bahrain. He and his family flew to Abu Dhabi and managed to get a seat on one of the three last British Airways flights to London.
Mid-flight, the pilots had to turn south to avoid the flight path of the first U.S. jets launching attacks over Iraq. The captains were told to land in Saudi Arabia but ignored the instructions and headed for a safer landing in Nairobi, Kenya.
Underwood and his family used the diversion as an excuse to go on a safari before they eventually flew on to London.
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