Ampaire Hires Collier Trophy Winner Doug Shane as GM
Los Angeles, Calif. (May 22, 2020) – Ampaire, a leader in practical applications of electric power for aviation, announced today that Doug Shane is joining the company as General Manager, positioning Ampaire for growth in the emerging electric aircraft segment.
“Ampaire is developing scalable electric technologies that can help lead aviation out of the environmental, economic, and public health challenges that have hobbled the industry,” said company co-founder and CEO Kevin Noertker. “Doug Shane is the personification of the pioneering spirit we, as an industry, need now.”
Shane, an engineer and test pilot with a successful track record in managing novel high-tech aerospace ventures, began his career as the first employee at Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, an incubator for innovative aircraft designs. He succeeded Rutan as president of the company and led the negotiations culminating in the sale of Scaled Composites to Northrop Grumman in 2007.
He later served as president and then chairman of The Spaceship Company, leading the development of spacecraft for Virgin Galactic.
Shane was a named recipient, along with Burt Rutan and others, of the prestigious Collier Trophy in 2004 for the SpaceShipOne program, and participated in the development of the Voyager aircraft, which circled the planet unrefueled and also won the Collier Trophy.
“The current air transport crisis demands a new way of doing things, with fresh thinking on sustainable models,” said Shane. “We’re at the very beginning of a new era of low-emission, low-cost electric-powered flight. Ampaire has gathered the talent and put forward the ideas that can lead us into this new era. We’re already flying a hybrid-electric demonstrator to pioneer technologies that can be scaled up for widespread commercial applications. This is tremendously exciting to me and extremely important to the aviation industry.”
Shane has also won the Iven C. Kincheloe Award, for Outstanding Professional Accomplishment in Flight Testing and the James H. Doolittle Award, for Outstanding Accomplishment in Technical Management in Aerospace Technology from the Society of Experimental Test Pilots.
He graduated from the University of Kansas in 1982 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering. Shane has flown more than 150 types of aircraft including the first flights of several experimental aircraft and is a Commercial pilot with more than 4,000 hours of flight time.