Douglas (or Doug) Malewicki is an American aerospace engineer and inventor. Many of his inventions concern flying vehicles, but the range is quite diverse. [1] He is also the concept creator and inventor of Skytran PRT (Personal Rapid Transit)[2].
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Douglas spent the past 20 years advancing the Skytran concept, an on-demand, personalized MagLev, suspended ultralight transit system, as well as advancing Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) in general, especially suspended PRT[3]. His ideas have inspired many variations to the PRT concept[4], including the Schweeb an amusement park ride, to be used as the prototype for a similar PRT concept adopted by Google[5].
Douglas developed the 157 and 156-miles-per-gallon "California Commuter" cars that hold the Guinness fuel economy records for street-legal vehicles driven at freeway speeds—an example of green vehicles.[6]
He studied and developed various engineering solutions for Highly-aerodynamic Human-powered vehicles such as Recumbent bicycles.[7]
Douglas developed the following vehicles and rides:
Douglas was also involved in the development and invention of the following:
The card games Nuclear War and expansions ("Nuclear Proliferation", "Nuclear Escalation", and "Weapons of Mass Destruction").
An aeronautical engineer by training,[13][14] Malewicki spent much of his career working for American aeronautics and space companies: the Apollo program moon landing vehicles, the Stealth bomber, and Cessna aircraft including their first private jet airplane. He was a model rocket enthusiast, becoming famous early in his career for the Malewicki Equations that predicted the altitude and coast time of a model rocket flight.
According to Malewicki's daughter, he was the inspiration for the original one eyed monster, called Mike on Peewee's Playhouse TV show, and later to become the inspiration for Mike Wazowski drawn by Ricky Nierva in Monsters Inc.[15]. A copy of the game plans in which he drew the first image of this alien is distributed free.
Anti PRT websites often criticize Malewicki for showing a concept as a finished product. He has been criticized by them that he is at a conflict of interest between his advising at Carbon Angel and his work on Skytran as CEO of his company Aerovisions Inc.[16]
Several attempts at advancing the Skytran concept have failed in the past, including a name and team change. An attempt by business people to take the Skytran name from Douglas failed, but the website was changed from .com to .net. A company run by volunteers advancing the concept has been established called Unimodal.
