Inventor Gets Lift From Hovercraft Business

ASTORIA, Ore. - Put away those visions of space-age silver discs skimming over watery planets.

Presenting the modern-day hovercraft: a real working-class cruiser.

"Kelly I in the hover!"

Raising his voice over the propeller noise, Charlie Beyer directed his canine companion into his latest creation.

The dog jumped in with a doubtful look. Beyer gunned the motor, and the 15-foot-long hovercraft lifted slightly from a shallow puddle on the Port of Astoria's recently retired log-export deck and took off in a spray of water. Man and dog shrank quickly into the distance, Kelly's ears held back by the wind.

Beyer clearly enjoys his work. But for the retired Sierra Nevada mining engineer, making hovercrafts is no mere pleasure trip.

Beyer's latest hovercraft was shipped off recently for a government job, making it the fourth sold since the enterprising engineer started seriously tinkering with the design in 1995.

For $13,000, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Newport acquired a research vessel that will carry scientists about 10 inches off the mud flats and watery expanses of Washington's Willapa Bay while they study spartina, a non-native grass taking over the natural systems of the renowned estuary.

For value that's hard to gauge, Beyer found a calling that makes him happy and makes his world a better place.

Opting to retire from the Denver corporate lunches and business suits of his former existence designing computer ore models for gold mines in the dry mountains of California and Nevada, the easygoing inventor moved his family to Astoria last October, along with his company, Air Cushion Technologies.

"I like it better out here - it's more green," Beyer said. Selling hovercrafts that boost environmental study beats life as a "corporate wienie," he said.

"They're being used to enhance scientific knowledge of these environments."

Along with the EPA, the Washington state Department of National Resources, the Washington state Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the San Francisco Bay Area parks department and several oyster growers also put in orders. Beyer hopes to start making bigger hovercraft for use in oil-spill cleanup.

This particular hovercraft was made for working on mud, its rubber skirt reinforced with a conveyor belt to protect against tears from rocks, sticks or razor-sharp oyster shells. It can travel up to 35 mph, maneuvered by a combination of pedals and rudders.

Like all hovercraft, it runs on a bubble of air generated by a fan underneath the steel hull. The lift fan fills a pressure chamber under the craft's skirt. A propeller behind lends forward motion.

The hovercraft bug bit Beyer when he attended a University of Washington engineering exposition as a boy.

Later, he built early models in a chicken shack in the high, dry country near Lakeview, Calif., said Beyer's wife, Bronwen Miller.

But the Northwest spawned Beyer's very first prototype, fashioned from a lawn-mower engine and a piece of plywood. It sank into Seattle's Lake Washington Ship Canal when the wood became soaked and disintegrated.

"I made a lot between that one and this - as technology improved, hopefully," Beyer said, smiling.