North American Eagle at COE

I just finished writing an article about Ed Shadle and the team at North American Eagle. NAE is building a vehicle that they hope will break the current land speed record held by the ThrustSSC. Rather than building a vehicle from the ground up, Ed's team has converted an F-104 Starfighter jet into a land-based vehicle that they hope will surpass the current record of 763mph set in 1997. If all goes according to plan, Shadle will attempt to reach 800mph on July 4, 2010.

The article will soon appear in Desktop Engineering magazine. But advance copies of the article were distributed on Wednesday in Seattle when three members of the NAE team—Ed Shadle, Keith Zanghi, and Steve Wallace—spoke at the COE conference.



After their presentation, I spent some time with them in the AMD/ATI booth at the conference where Lenovo's newly launched ThinkStation S20, D20 were showcased along with the ThinkPad W500 running CATIA and the Eagle models. Also on display was a scale model of the Eagle and the front wheel that was designed on Lenovo ThinkStation using CATIA. Here I am on the right along with the NAE team and Zee Effendi from Lenovo.



I'll let you know as soon as the article is available online. In the meantime, here's a photo of the North American Eagle vehicle taken last summer in the desert during one of the test runs.