Spiderman - James McCarthy

James McCarthy has invented a world-first – a product called a Spider that greatly improves your chances of surviving if you end up in a plane crash.

A Massey alumnus (Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) Mechatronics), James has been taking things apart since he was a small boy – radios, cars, televisions, remotes, anything he could lay his hands on – just to see how it works.

He took this love of ‘how things work’ through the study of mechatronics at Massey’s School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, after which he started working for a local pilot, Don Sandbrook.

Don didn’t want to share the fate of a high-profile businessman whose helicopter crashed in 2005, and was not found for 14 days because his transmitter failed on impact. So he tasked James with finding a better alternative.

He came up with the Spider. The box, attached to the control panel of the plane, relays the aircraft’s GPS position in real-time to the spidertracks website so friends and family can see where it is.  If something goes wrong, the aircraft can be found fast, based on its last reported position.

The Kiwi way

The old technology is akin to black boxes. If the plane goes down and the machine is destroyed, it can’t send out the SOS.

In typical Kiwi fashion, James asked why – and went about inventing something better. A world-first, the Spider is a portable device, able to be plugged into the plane’s cigarette lighter. It relays your location constantly to the internet, so even if the box doesn’t survive a crash, the information does.

Spidertracks didn’t invent tracking; what they invented was a cheap, simple, effective way of tracking flight movements in real time for both commercial and recreational pilots. Other companies had tracking devices, but they involved red tape and complicated installation. The Spider is cheaper, easier to install and more effective.

Today Spidertracks is sold everywhere from Alaska and Columbia to Europe and Australia – in 62 countries around the world.

The Engine of the new New Zealand

James’ story is a great example of how Massey people are having an impact on the world stage.

Massey’s people are the engine that’s driving the new New Zealand – a place where we are not about “she’ll be right” but about being confident about our ideas – taking them out to the world, and competing with the best the world has to offer. For more stories like James visit www.engine.ac.nz