Aircraft design, 3-D Solid Modeling, CNC Machining, 3-D printing, Carbon fiber composite fabrication
Mechanical, Industrial, Aeronautical Design
Architectural and Structural Detailing
Designers and builders of advanced aircraft In 2002 we registered as a Montana LLC, often doing structural and architectural detail design work, including production in steel and wood. Carbon fiber composite work
was our secret superpower, having developed many novel systems for tooling and production of highly advanced thermoset and thermoplastic items previously. 3-D printing in metals and structural polymers was added in 2006. Today we have a huge array of future products, inventions and valuable insights headed to commercialization in multiple industries. Some of them are much bigger than anything prior, which is saying a lot. Proprietary technologies for aircraft, electric motors, fluid dynamic propulsion and various confidential breakthroughs make us very excited for the future. In 2004 our founder, John McGinnis, invented an entirely new class of airplane configurations. Their basic advantage was an almost unprecedented reduction of the portion of drag that is due to the weight of an airplane. We designed, built, and tested many examples of the McGinnis wing architecture, both in software and in flight testing at various relevant scales, and we created the patent drawings and other digital assets that allowed patent applications to be filed in 2007. We also advanced an optimal-sized aircraft for fundamental research (into high efficiency and laminar flow at high speeds) all the way to version 20, and we put version 18 into flight testing at 25% scale in October of 2007. This testing was extremely successful in every regard, leading to the 2008 formation of a spinoff company to hold the rights to develop "Synergy" in full scale, as a five seat kit aircraft. To help protect the visually obvious part of our IP, we had to stay in stealth mode until NASA requested that we allow our video for them to be shared in an unveiling event. Since patents would not be guaranteed to issue, and wouldn't issue for many more years, licensing them was not a practical option, and the scale and timelines of the investment required did not match those of available investment interest well enough to allow focus on the most critical creative work, without which there would be nothing of lasting value. However, it soon became apparent that the companies who were able to directly utilize our extensive investment in CNC-machinable, digital engineering assets would naturally prefer to charge us what we could have charged our clients for similar work, rather than take similar risks with us. So, lacking access to affordable multimillion dollar funding during a recession, MC Squared Design took on the challenge to supply the McGinnis family with CAD and CAM 3-D design work to allow low cost CNC construction of our parts in Pat's garage, using mostly volunteer labor. Thousands of computer files we created provided the substance behind the many high quality renderings, visualization tools, flight test photos and videos they enabled. From 3-D solid models to CNC code, these assets captured the shapes, embedded algorithms and 'secret sauce' relationships, dimensions, John's airfoils, and other proprietary information necessary to duplicate, iterate, and analyze every part. Synergy was the first aircraft of its category to be completely developed as a digital design asset, like the Boeing 777. Anyone with a computer could theoretically reproduce it for their own purposes, if they had our files in their possession, as DBT Aero Inc. In 2011, Sport Aviation magazine and the EAA declared Synergy the Most Innovative new aircraft design. Popular Science named it the best invention of 2013 and put it on the cover worldwide. The present aircraft has received its airworthiness certification and has been spotted in high speed taxi testing, yet in the only video where it can be seen, DBT is now promoting a tiny model built using our full scale geometries. We believe that if not for the nefarious intentions, fraudulent manipulations and colossal mistakes of current DBT management under the secretive influence of Michael A. Duke, Synergy Prime could have flown to Oshkosh years ago, and the past five years would have had a production focus, instead of what follows below. Fourteen years of working double shifts allowed John (with his father, his children, and many awesome helpers) to literally make every part and mold, then to spend countless hours designing or directing us in the creation and assembly and documentation of every new part in 3-D software, all while strategizing and testing future production methods and communicating with the outside world. Since carbon fiber aircraft development in this size class costs tens of millions of dollars and a decade or more, these huge investments by the McGinnis family allowed an unusual amount of value to be created using, as one investor put it, "less money than the rounding errors in a conventional program." For their years of personal sacrifice, John and his family were assured by most people that it would obviously pay off in the end. Synergy's performance and economy literally rewrite the aeronautical textbooks with new chapters on using stability, control, and structural requirements for drag reduction purposes, and its suitability as a technology platform for the new era of ultra-efficient, fast regional transport using high speed laminar flow opens a trillion dollar global market. If built to spec, Synergy would set world records virtually every week. After Synergy Aircraft was formed with our post-2004 assets in 2010, our work until 2020 was still performed at a 40% discount, on the same $78k annual retainer. Despite that amazing fact, even our retainer went unpaid for a large portion of most years. The discount and large accumulated shortfall to us was recognized by Synergy management as the valuable investment in thousands of new tangible assets that it was. Many simple options to capture it were central to discussions with potential contributors, especially including the despicable person who conned the McGinnis family and all of our fellow Synergy Aircraft members, initially out of 85% of our equity, based upon utterly false representations of his intentions and value and supposed potential to become John's long-sought financial cofounder. Rare value always invites such nefarious behaviors. From Synergy's debut in 2011 came an endless parade of semi-obvious annual attempts to grab our baby and pawn it for quick cash at a huge profit. In total, many years of potential progress were lost to false promises and interference. Nothing compares, however, to feeling like a bank that accidentally hired a world class bank robber to be their chief of security. In 2018 this charming, well groomed, professional but unnaturally nervous individual made lots of slick but empty promises to us and to our fellow Synergy Aircraft investors. His job, as an outside latecomer being offered our equity, was to bring an agreed minimum amount of capital and to document our investments in support of their value. A year after the merger with Synergy in 2019, it became clear that none of the terms of agreement we accepted to allow this person to have a cofounder role in DBT Aero Inc. were being honored. We now know his real goal was to weasel into power and obtain the value of our investments for himself, and total control, without contributing as agreed. Instead of booking our investments and digital assets, he did the opposite, claiming a "settlement" in 2019 to the IRS in which $1.4M in assets were disposed of. His false financials, years in the making, tried to hide them in retained earnings and claim they were not contributed, enabling false claims, not only to the stock John was offered in exchange for his property, but to the stock we in Synergy Aircraft already held. While the conspirators still had the money, the company was positioned for insolvency claims so that everyone could be liquidated, exploiting their position as protected investors having a liquidation preference, but giving everything to the raiders. One of his many frauds was to hide one of the documents John and others signed in which Synergy bought John's patents with its Common Units, then later make a huge fuss about "assigning them" to the successor company, which already received them as a Synergy asset. He made certain they were never booked either way. It was three years before he even let anyone see that mess he cooked up, and then tried to blame it on someone who never once touched the books of the company, its founder, John McGinnis. Presently, DBT believes it has deprived Mr. McGinnis, his father Pat, and us of 100% of their Preferred stock in DBT Aero Inc and left them with 0.0016, 0% and 0% of their own company, respectively. Their reward for inventing scores of important aircraft; designing and personally building Synergy: less than two tenths of a percent of whatever value they created for the shareholders, including the one whose Class A Common shares were never paid for. Guess who thinks that part we gave him (without receiving any payment or net-positive value) is worth "a billion dollars?"
Our valuable property has simply been stolen; edited right out of the Company capitalization table, with corresponding loss of rights, because the person who put himself in charge behind a puppet is a brazen deceiver who had no intention of honoring the terms of his participation. Is this wonderful nice guy a truly masterful manipulator? A psychopathic narcissist, who has done this before? We're not the only ones who want to know. Even his eight children, according to him, "want nothing to do with" him. Since 2018 he controlled all the cash, a good portion of which came from prior legal action against someone else by similar claims. What do you know about the first US importer of Remos aircraft, a supposed FBO owner in Riverside, CA circa last decade, Michael A. Duke, or an entity called Chronos and Moneta? [email protected]
While we focused on the full scale aircraft, this person used his well paid time to replace trusted staff, undermine, defame and disempower John using vague, counterfeit private narratives, all while quietly killing off public information flow and outside support from interested parties. It seems that for five years, he has been privately planting the idea that John, (who delegated all of the financial accounting to a trusted shareholder and to the CPA of another, now untrusted one), was merely squandering investor funds to enrich himself without performing. No project in aviation history accomplished more with less, most of it invested by the McGinnis family. Synergy embodies not just one cutting-edge innovation, but countless solutions that all work together with stunning simplicity and practicality to deliver unprecedented performance. In 2014-2015, using his own skills and resourcefulness, John negotiated a $2.8M non-dilutive license and services contract to provide completion funding. He used that revenue and profit to hire staff and run operations. When the licensing portion of the contract was unexpectedly cancelled by the foreign client to pursue their own preexisting ideas already underway, John was left with a huge burn rate and some difficult future obligations. He believed, and reported to shareholders, that the Company would not survive his failure to capitalize. When Michael A. Duke of Utah came nosing around in 2017, he seemed like the perfect person to help solve a serious problem and in 2018 John began entrusting him with information critical to executing his plan to create and prepare a fundable Company for professional investment. John's plan from day one was to set up a Delaware corporation using a top venture law firm, selected specifically to facilitate the large scale series of fundings required to start an aircraft company. Our invitation to Mr. Duke to participate required $4-8M through the door in seed funding, so as to create a company fundable for rapid growth at scale, which is another deeply studied category of Mr. McGinnis' long entrepreneurial history. "Only a moron would put the patents in an unfunded startup," as one professional investor had put it, and John had never allowed a condition previously where someone could steal all the pieces of the prize through physical theft or financial deceit. Prior to DBT, he owned the patents, as they were always his, applied to thousands of potential aircraft designs, were never paid for by others, and were filed long before any outside investors came along (2007). He was on many occasions offered tens of millions of dollars to allow their control by others. The terms offered by Mr. Nice Guy to Mr. McGinnis to put them in Synergy included immediate capital raise of $4-$10M USD; 295,500 Common Units purchased by patent assignment; voting rights; permanent board position; salaried employment contract; and position as Chairman, CTO, and CEO following statutory merger as offered and accepted by Synergy Aircraft stockholders. Not one of those things remain true for John McGinnis, the largest investor, by far, yet the pirate remains in possession of Mr. McGinnis' investments, patents, digital files, tools, equipment, and the improperly modified full scale aircraft, in addition to other personal and business property not owned by DBT. It isn't widely known that John McGinnis actually volunteered his expert construction services from 2006 onward as part of his (unrecognized and uncompensated) overall investment. His father likewise. Until 2020 he was never paid for building our first man-rated aircraft, nor did he normally draw any salary from either company, as he intended that the homebuilding process would be for his own enjoyable education, per the FAA regulations and other terms he had agreed to. Building it personally would yield deeply informed, physically tested assets for his company with obvious commercial value. Each finished part closed a design loop intended to allow his future staff to make informed production design decisions quickly. Flying it personally was to be his first and most important reward, but the work was undertaken for the benefit of humanity and the Company and to demonstrate true breakthrough solutions to the multiple problems that have crippled general aviation. McGinnis is a highly experienced serial entrepreneur. Normally, he would have done as he advised his clients; hiring and capitalizing and managing in the usual manner. Yet aircraft startups have a terrible history of exploitation and derailment to match their last-place position as a wise early investment. Startups with far less than our first LLC had in 2008 raised $30M or more to get underway, yet they're long gone. Those who survived the requirements of an aircraft company have sunk hundreds of millions in the long, slow process of arriving, too often, at entirely the wrong destination. Synergy is different. It has permanent value and spectacular demand. The issue was and always will be production at scale, at the price that is designed to be possible. To avoid early deviations away from the 'mandatory and unforgiving requirements' of a producible, laminar flow aircraft, John elected to personally remove as much technical risk as possible ahead of igniting a high burn rate on professional investment timelines. Having succeeded, he formed DBT as Incorporator, Founder, and President to raise the capital to hire the world class team to execute his thorough plan to deliver aircraft, to a long line of eager early adopters. It certainly could have done so. Yet within just a few months of his first salaried employment as CEO in 2020, Mr. McGinnis and the Company were again without resources. His 'cofounder' had waited until enough of the equity he was given, but never paid for, vested to lock-in his self-appointed board seat, then he sold his house and began systematically engaging his takeover scheme through financial strangulation. Company counsel advised the Board that his then-tendered hostile bid, an offer for $950K presented against the warnings of Mr. McGinnis and against the strong objections of the majority in interest, was an offer of strings-attached money in exchange for control of who could occupy the third Board seat, giving two-to-one authority to undermine Synergy Founder control and contravene prior representations made to obtain their shareholder approval of the merger. All possible means of limiting the time and resources of the McGinnis family were used to force the hostile takeover through, from April through October. Trained staff was furloughed and lost. John was denied income. MC Squared Design was to be denied its retainer, leaving Mr. McGinnis to personally juggle design, construction, training, executive, and fiduciary responsibilities in a typical business workday, under their appointment of an ambitious but unqualified new "CEO" with a separate agenda. John was to resign and submit, not with a golden parachute or golden handcuffs, nor even by his natural, future founder transition to new executive leadership, but carrying heavy weights of substantially lesser value. Being essentially finished (after redesigning the aircraft for a new engine and propulsion system) he did so anyway, eventually completing the critical portion of his work, but it came at extreme cost to his and his family's mental and physical heath. But wait, there's more! After succeeding to take over management, then the Board, the pirates proceeded in their premeditated scheme to defraud investors of their purchased equity by deceitful and dishonest means. John was suddenly pressured to "settle" vague claims intended, as we now know, to provide cover for the 2019 fraud already "settled." Instead of the shareholder-signed statutory merger which conveyed all assets to DBT, suddenly the registered mailings talked about non-statutory "conversion" and unsubstantiated equity, as if all their assets had come from thin air! The offers made to convince Synergy Aircraft investors to accept 15% of their prior ownership percentage and give this 'harmless' Boy Scout way more stock than all of them put together, for nothing, included giving himself a way to swindle them out of the benefits of their investments, if he could simply eliminate Mr. McGinnis' controlling interest. After some of the scheme had begun to seem obvious and he was asked to leave, this person said "I wouldn't sell my stock for less than a billion dollars." He told the IRS he personally paid $1,973,250 for it, which is blatantly false. He paid nothing whatsoever. He told the shareholders a similar lie, with bigger numbers to try to claim his millions of free shares were paid for. Much later he siphoned as much of his brother's smaller and deeply discounted hostile bid as he could, flying himself and a well paid employee from Salt Lake City to company-provided accommodations in Montana, every week. He also charged for office rent and detailed expenses at his Riverton home after unilaterally declaring it 'Company headquarters' without authorization. In August 2021 we started blowing the whistle on the many constructive actions being taken to knowingly deprive Synergy Aircraft stockholders of the benefits of their investments through coercion and extortion and fraudulent financial representations to them and the Board. Yet when asked to fire the ring leader cooking the books, the "CEO" at the time admitted to being the one who "brokered the deal." Ultimately, in several more tries using people he had deceived with false accounting, the person who had so carefully gained our confidence attempted to take unpaid, unearned, majority control of all 31 million shares of DBT Aero Inc through a rapid fire series of manipulations, all in total contravention of shareholder approved actions and his own representations to Mr. McGinnis and Synergy Aircraft LLC members. Only now can DBT management spin a bogus version of the March 2022 events in which John was denied prior and present income and locked out of the building in retaliation against his exposure of this secret plot to liquidate everyone by abusing him out of the Company. The day before, Mr. McGinnis had tendered a letter to the Board in which he blocked their contrived disposal of the Class A Common Stock he had purchased for $2.9M (by assigning his patents to Synergy Aircraft in exchange for Common Units, which converted automatically to DBT Class A Common per the shareholder-accepted terms of the Plan of Merger). The locks to the building were then changed overnight and John was deprived of his tools and computers and personal and business property, including our computers and hard drives. He was defamed to employees and shareholders and others, denied salary and agreed terms of employment including his right to set his own hours and his right to work from home, and later, they even actively interfered with earned UI benefits. The next move was to grab his permanent board seat. Initially this was attempted through extortion, then through continuation of a long pattern of denying him the many tens of thousands of earned dollars still owed to him by the Company. (100% of Mr. McGinnis' net worth is invested. If he could be bankrupted it would disqualify him from serving on the Board and thereby trigger a change in voting control from Class A to Class B.) Failing that, taking John's fully paid Common stock (a small fraction of the total stock of the Company) while letting the pirate keep his UNPAID Common stock would trigger various Change of Control provisions of legal documents and expose shareholders to undisclosed risks of liquidation. All of which had been set up by them from the beginning by writing off and concealing the assets in their fictional financials. Dozens of attempts were made to lay false claim to any and all stock paid for and owned by John and his family. Even after legal counsel gave them one last chance to act in good faith ahead of shareholder action, they continued to defame and manipulate. John's rights with regard to his baby, Synergy, are well established and defensible. His more recent work is much more advanced however and does not require the same R&D period. He is able to provide people of good character many types of potential benefits from their collaboration or interest in advancing his work, regardless of which opportunities are involved. Yet unless our tiny company, the McGinnis family, and our fellow Synergy Aircraft shareholders can more powerfully reveal the extremely skillful duplicity and cunning, patient manipulations of this bad actor, we will soon find that we have been deprived of the benefits of our investments, through this conspiracy by the duo in charge at DBT Aero Inc. and their dupes. We and many others feel we were deceptively enticed to invest our assets in that corporation, by someone who knowingly and willfully engaged in coercion, blackmail, extortion, breach of fiduciary responsibility, breach of contract with its implied duty of good faith and fair dealing, felony deceptive business practices, and other crimes, all in order to conceal a fraud being perpetrated by them, in which the key assets of the company were hidden off the books and a secret $1.4M writeoff was made, in 2019, all to be charged to John McGinnis using the very terms they alone are guilty of. Long after being removed from management in October 2020 "to help take some of the load off," Mr. McGinnis remained the largest investor in the company by far and the source of 100% of its opportunities and assets. In the hands of a capable team, he could have retired, or led them to his visionary outcome. He had earned, and he owned, an incredibly reasonable amount of the total equity of the company. Had the Board and management simply acted as fiduciaries, sale of the company or growth could have given him a return on his pre-2008 investment. Instead, for nearly two years, present DBT management spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to back out of paying any part of the small sums owed to us and to Mr. McGinnis under their reign, and to back into "a settlement" with a "mutual release of claims" that kept mysteriously circling back, despite wildly varying schemes and ridiculous accounting, to the same fraudulent writeoff figure. "There has to be a scapegoat," the conspirator said to Mr. McGinnis, who is ironically the most at-risk, most invested person he is obligated to as a fiduciary. DBT Aero produced what investigators have called "ludicrous" draft financial accountings to assert that instead of the obligations owed to Mr. McGinnis and others, (as detailed in an August 2021 letter to DBT from John McGinnis) John supposedly "owed DBT Aero" somewhere between 5% and 250% of all the moneys ever invested in Synergy Aircraft. He was welcome to pay it with his Common Stock, worth $600. No deal. Since we were denied entry to recover our assets and equipment after completing our final parts last year, we have nevertheless observed a large number of unapproved modifications, major mistakes and changes that are visually obvious to the shareholders and which appear in some cases to introduce inappropriate new forces, moments, and load paths on the current prototype, which is hundreds of pounds overweight due to management dismissal and denial of design imperatives such as solo front cockpit operations. We have serious safety concerns and hold the former CEO Noyes responsible for the many decisions he presumptuously took "full engineering responsibility for" in April 2022, such as incorrectly and dangerously redesigning the tested nose gear geometries and structures. Instead of simply installing the specified tire size and testing it on runways as directed, DBT concluded that steering by braking was a problem in the dramatically sloped and obstacle-rich environment behind our shop, and that our more advanced steerable nose gear was the problem. The steering lock, however, is observed in photos and videos to be deployed (and obvious 'stuck parking brake' issues were not even recognized.) Instead, they 'fixed' it by unqualified, unnecessary redesign, dramatically overloading the nose gear structures in a way that would look more like common 1950s designs, but not intelligently engineered for the load paths and new liabilities they created. The wheel itself remains too marginal for the old location, but has also been moved dramatically aft, making things much worse. Warnings provided by Mr. McGinnis were arrogantly dismissed without discussion, but have been delivered and received recently as follows. We believe the aircraft is 'two snapped bolts away from a high speed disaster', and that the foreseeable loading will exceed the capability of those two bolts, in part due to the inappropriate geometry itself, and in part due to the results of that change, which binds and potentially damages suspension response, increasing shock loading. Achieving laminar flow for this aircraft requires conformity to the precise geometric shapes and tolerances we created and specified, and it is troubling that nonconforming final assembly conditions are clearly visible from a great distance even on video recordings. Reaching the non-credible numbers publicly stated by DBT will require that qualified experts restore the damaged geometries to our specifications, within Carmichael's tolerance criteria (which was easily achievable previously.) Without required laminar flow, drag more than doubles. In a related topic, fan testing confirmed, as predicted, that the required high RPMs for acceptable HP and static thrust could not be reached even with the 505 HP engine presently installed unless the blades are trimmed from 'test length' to their actual design length. Instead of moving to that step, which by the same advanced analysis revealed the key insight, DBT lost their propulsive cooling system integration and began using a three blade prop that's not even capable of safe flight speeds without excessive gyroscopic moment of inertia and high tip Mach number. One of the quietest propfans ever created is now so loud, it can be identified from miles away. Such unwelcome vibration was previously 'designed out' of the aircraft by our free pivoting, low-Mach fan blade design and may not be well tolerated by structures. We have reason to believe that some of these conditions flow from a pattern of efforts to deniably interfere in ways that keep the debut aircraft from delivering useful leverage to Mr. McGinnis. Thousands of people following John's journey online would rejoice and speak much truth if the aircraft were known to be flight ready. A factor in the March 2022 lockout event had to do with Mr. McGinnis, with trained former assistants, assembling the aircraft for necessary weight and balance, steering and fitment checks. This was done over the weekend so as not to disrupt layup work performed during the work week. Putting everything together, however, totally exposed the counterfeit narrative being prepared, in which the technically complete aircraft was just "a partially finished fuselage" prior to the "company saving" actions of its primary obstructor, who deceitfully controlled the limited funding. From 2018 onward, many critical elements of the design we created were blocked from ex*****on, including control system, landing gear, avionics, and propulsion system details... which were designed in foresight of current DBT problems. A certain individual also personally damaged structures and parts with the result that arbitrary funding milestones could not be reached. Although the DBT Board ordered that Mr. McGinnis be provided information and a seat on their post-mutiny "technical committee," no information has been provided, nor has the Company requested or accepted information from Mr. During all this time leading up to the spring of 2022, DBT never filed tax returns or released their overcooked books, having taken physical possession of the physical records of Synergy Aircraft and eliminating synergyaircraft.com email and website hosting, impairing rebuttal using truthful evidence. John was finally able to coax their scheme fully into the open when, upon their believing that he had just signed away his entire investment for nothing, "CEO" Noyes triumphantly circulated bogus financial statements exposing how they wanted, and would have succeeded, to undo shareholder protections against hostile takeover and liquidation (if not for Mr. McGinnis' depth of understanding of the complexities being leveraged and exploited.) They also ignored their responsibility to design and execute actual full scale aircraft production, focusing entirely upon depriving Synergy Aircraft, LLC stockholders and Mr. McGinnis of their preexisting property by masterfully deceitful and thoroughly dishonest means. On paper, of course. The truth is not changed by financial fiction. A full third party forensic investigation of the actions of present DBT management has been ordered by the minority shareholders who were there with us from the beginning. We want to hear from any powerful legal bulldogs that we can creatively afford to hire. We want to hear what you were told that might defame Mr. McGinnis as he finished his masterwork. This page is subject to updates as new information becomes available. [email protected]
Shareholders, not including us or any of the family who created everything, were recently informed that their CEO John Paul Noyes is now the COO. Michael A. Duke is the CEO and Secretary and "permanent" Board member of DBT Aero Inc. It's interesting and unusual that this work, Synergy, cannot be spoiled except by shoddy ex*****on, and therefore has no shelf life problem. It will be just as new tomorrow as yesterday. The geometries and topologies of Synergy are a physical expression of unchanging, fundamental principles of fluid dynamics. Like the great aircraft of the past, it will serve for countless decades, as soon as it shows up in useful quantities. No one has anything to rival it, other than us.
