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20 In conversation | Geoff Cathcart It also gave him plenty of opportunities to learn the ins and outs of engine testing and development. “Back then, when Orbital was an IP company working on injection and combustion technologies across the automotive sector, it wasn’t involved in UAVs or engineering contracts at all,” he says. “The work was about developing technologies that we’d then license to other companies, then reinvest the licensing and royalty fees to stay on the leading edge of r&d, and so the cycle went. “By the late 1990s, however, Orbital shifted to becoming more of an engineering services company, in parallel with continuing to develop our own technologies.” Those technologies were focused on two-stroke engines and direct injection (DI) systems, as air-assisted DI had been developed in-house to support a unique engine design. Although the engine had many issues and was dropped as a project, the quality of fuel atomisation and lack of surface wetting from DI has enabled the core technology to stand the test of time. Orbital also saw small, efficient engines as being the way ahead, although it also provided r&d to numerous automotive OEMs for DI on four-strokes. That gave Cathcart and his colleagues the chance to work with practically every major automotive OEM over a five- or six- year period, including BMW, Mercedes, General Motors, Ford, as well as major brands from Japan and China. “They were some of the most well- established engineering houses in the world, and we learned not just about some of the great technology they had access to, but some of the most amazing processes for how to develop really impressive engines from blank- sheet designs, and how different those processes can be from one OEM to the next,” he says. “Some would talk about cost on Day One of a new project. At others, performance and technology development would be the focus, with cost becoming more important as the project developed and the product moved closer to the production cycle. “Different philosophies altered entire development cycles. That kind of education isn’t easy to come by, and we learned a lot of valuable detail in those years.” Those experiences would pay dividends in the mid-2000s, as Orbital’s dedication to DI two-strokes found a new market. The Orbital technology had already been in production since 1996, in sectors such as marine outboard engines, motorcycles and jet skis, where two- strokes were already in use. “We’d done some work for Mercury Marine, after the US military asked them for an outboard engine that was capable of running on JP-5,” Cathcart says. “That was very successful, and we learned a lot about heavy-fuel DI.” Such was that success that he and his colleagues began looking to see where else DI systems for heavy fuel were in demand – and UAVs emerged as the natural answer. “Two-strokes were dominant among UAVs – and in many circles they still are – for their power-to-weight ratio, efficiency and reliability. They ran mainly on gasoline, and many, like the US military, wanted to get away from gasoline,” he notes. “Our first production UAV engine was developed with Textron, for the Aerosonde Mk 4.7 small UAS. We designed an engine for them using our DI system, and manufactured it for the first 18 months before the manufacturing duty was transferred to Textron’s subsidiary Lycoming.” In 2012, Cathcart was appointed CTO of Orbital, to oversee the running of tasks and objectives needed for the success of its new duties as a manufacturer of engines in addition to just designing them. He continued performing many tasks himself, however, particularly in the design of combustion chambers and pistons. “Soon after, Insitu took notice of our DI technology, and the N20 we co-developed with them became our second high-volume production engine,” he says. “In its ScanEagle engine we had much more responsibility than on the Textron project, including virtually the complete back half of the UAV and all the engine validation, for FAA Part 33-type testing for example. “As we took on these extra responsibilities it rapidly brought a new-found appreciation for human resources. We went so far as to recruit internationally for people with February/March 2021 | Unmanned Systems Technology Cathcart has overseen the development of new facilities in Oregon (pictured) and Australia to greatly expand Orbital UAV’s production and MRO capabilities