Legal battle over inflatable sail. At stake is the navigation of the future

The inflatable sail story we told you about HERE is becoming an international intrigue. In the middle is a colossal business of the future. In fact, there is more at stake than just a bright idea to make it easier to go sailing.

Also at stake is the future of ship navigation, seeking a reduction in fuel costs, which would cause a definite reduction in pollution.

Today, shipping traffic is responsible for 13 percent of total pollutant emissions into the atmosphere but is steadily increasing, in fact it is estimated to reach about 20 percent by 2050.

An untenable situation, which can be remedied by the use of sails by ships. Basically, it involves partly replacing motor propulsion with wind propulsion. Easy to say, almost impossible to accomplish. If not applying the idea born for recreational boating by transporting it to the world of maritime traffic.

The parties at stake in this intrigue are two Swiss, an Italian company that is a world leader in the use of air to create inflatable structures, and Michelin, one of the leading manufacturers of tires that happen to be, also, “inflatable objects.”

The idea comes from an inflatable drone

We had Mauro Oggero, CEO of Fly-In, tell us this story of passion turning into a financial thriller.

It is 2015. Italian Mauro Oggero, who is making an inflatable structure for the Solar Impulse plane, knows almost by chance the Swiss Edouard Kessi and Laurent Kalbermatten, who are sailors and are studying inflatable sail applications.

They like each other and a collaboration was born to design and build an inflatable wing-drone, which was derived from a Kalbermatten (2008) design for an inflatable hang glider.

An Italian consortium consortium, “Next Fly Consortium,” is formed to take advantage of Fly’s know-how that redesigns and engineers the Kalbermatten wing and transforms it into an inflatable remotely piloted drone wing, 2KO.

The first inflatable sail for a Laser

In 2016, the work of the Italian/Swiss tandem resulted in the construction of the first prototype inflatable sail to be mounted on a Laser, as the photos below show:

The inflatable sail works and immediately a large sail is made: 13 meters high installed on a large boat. The results are excellent (photo below)

Edouard Kessi and Laurent Kalbermatten tell Oggero they want to do further testing. “Instead,” Oggero himself recounts, “in addition to eclipsing Next Fly’s materials and prototypes, they refuse to settle the production accounts for the prototypes, designed and built by my company.”

The Swiss reappear with a new company

Instead, according to Oggero’s reconstruction, “they opened a new company(http://inflatedwingsails.com/en/, ed.) and passed off as their own projects, prototypes and tests, which they appropriated, but which they did not own. All the way to today’s collaboration with Michelin.”

The legal battle never ends

A legal battle waged by Fly has been ongoing for years. In involving the Italian and Swiss courts that is still in high gear. Legal dispute to recognize the authorship of the inflatable sail design that takes on significant economic value now that Michelin is also involved, which has seen in the application not only for recreational sailing but also for maritime transport a concrete new source of business. The battle has just begun.

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