How John-Paul Clarke’s Rules of Life Led Him to Become an Aviation Expert and Track and Field Official
A commercial flight from the East Coast prepares to land at Los Angeles International Airport. About 150 miles from the destination the engines go idle and it begins a slow and smooth descent.
This is different than your typical descent, which happens in a stairstep-like fashion, and requires the pilots to throttle up and down each step of the way.
If you've flown from the East Coast to LAX in the last decade or so, you're experiencing a landing procedure John-Paul Clarke helped to develop. He worked with air traffic controllers and aerospace designers at the Southern California Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facility to develop a flight procedure design methodology that was used to create more efficient flight arrival procedures from the East Coast that has saved billions of gallons of gasoline and hours of flight time.
"Every time I land in LA, I just feel good, like I've done something that made an incredible difference," said Clarke, a professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering's Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics.
Clarke is one of the newest faculty members in the Cockrell School, joining at the beginning of 2021. He brings with him an expertise in mathematics, applied to aircraft trajectory prediction and optimization, particularly as it relates to improving flight procedures that reduce the environmental impact of aviation. He is also an expert in the development and use of stochastic models and optimization algorithms to improve the efficiency and robustness of airline, airport and air traffic operations. Clarke’s work has influenced air transportation theory, policy and practice both at the national and international level.
Today, Clarke's focus is on urban air mobility, which includes autonomous aircraft and control/traffic control systems for these vehicles. He is also a co-founder of a startup called Universal Hydrogen, which aims to make hydrogen-powered commercial air travel a reality.
One example of his recent work is a NASA-funded project to develop methods that could be used to validate the cost and scalability of conceptual autonomous cargo operations. They will provide theory and concepts for all types of vehicles — from large unmanned cargo aircraft crossing the U.S. to the single drone that can drop a package in residential neighborhoods.
In addition to working on unmanned vehicles, the researchers are focusing public concerns of this type of transport, including things like noise, emission and safety.
"You can create a hill for each noise-sensitive area like a school or church," Clarke said about the project last year. "We can then modify the flight trajectory of an aerial vehicle to ensure it remains above the resulting terrain or thereby ensure the noise level at all locations stays below the noise threshold used to create the surface."
Starting Early
Clarke has had a lifelong fascination with aircraft. He took his first ever flight as a one-year-old from his hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, to New York on a Vickers VC10 aircraft.
His parents took him and his brother all over the world on planes. And it helped them develop a love of aviation. Clarke originally wanted to be a pilot, but he eventually set his sights on aerospace engineering because, he reasoned, he would actually get to design the planes that way. His interest continued to evolve toward air traffic and the logistics of managing all the planes in the sky.
Clarke's personal flight path has taken him from academia, through numerous parts of the aviation industry and back to the classroom and research lab. He's worked with airlines on flight trajectories, optimizing flight schedules to prevent delays and improving research and development portfolios. He's also spent time at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Boeing.
Clarke joined UT Austin from Georgia Tech. He is teaching again after a three years hiatus, including 18 months as the Vice President of Strategic Technologies at United Technologies Corporation (now Raytheon) and is in the process of recruiting students to continue to build his lab. Relationships with colleagues and students are very important to Clarke, one of the two main rules he lives his life by.
"I determined early on, dating back to my time as a student, you should work with people you like," Clarke said. "It makes the tough decisions and the tough discussions that much easier and beneficial to the team as a whole."
Hydrogen and Hammer Throws
Of all Clarke's endeavors, Universal Hydrogen may be the biggest swing. The company secured $85 million in funding last year. Clarke is the chief innovation officer of the company, which is developing hydrogen fuel cell retrofit kits for small commercial aircraft and aims to launch its first hydrogen-powered flight by 2025.
Clarke says the idea for the company was born out of a mutual desire between the executives to decarbonize commercial air travel. Global aviation is responsible for 2% of all human-created carbon dioxide emissions, per the Air Transport Action Group, and approximately 12% of transportation emissions.
Hydrogen is a good candidate for alternative aviation power, Clarke said, because of its abundance and specific energy. But, there is not a lot of infrastructure for transporting hydrogen, so not only will they have to figure out how to power airplanes with it, they also have to figure out the best ways to get it to the planes.
"That led us to think about if we could produce green hydrogen wherever it makes sense and be able to transport it using the intermodal freight system, and then just place it into the plane like a battery," Clarke said. "That way, we wouldn't need a new distribution system, could minimize the losses that come when you transfer hydrogen from one vessel to another and we could decouple the production from the consumption because the mode of transportation would also be the mode of storage. So, we are basically trying to solve all of that in one fell swoop."
Aviation is not Clarke's only passion. In his spare time, Clarke is a track and field official and serves on the World Athletics International Technical Officials panel for North America, Central America and the Caribbean.
A hammer thrower in his youth, Clarke has carried his love of track and field throughout his life, attending numerous Olympic Games as a spectator. There's a common theme here of Clarke finding ways to turn the things he is most excited about into his career pursuits.
"I've done a lot of seemingly random stuff," Clarke said. "I do what’s interesting to me. It's one of my rules in life – do fun and challenging things."
