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1 2 C T I N N O V A T O R S , 2 0 2 3 Innovation, with a side of pizza So, now that he is in charge of that room of brilliant, self-starting, and occasionally difficult people, what is Cherepinsky's recipe for innovation? "ere is no process," he says. "Anytime you try to apply process to innovation you end up stifling creativity. I hate using words like controlled chaos, but there is a little bit of that." And in our work-from-home world, he's a big proponent of his team getting some serious face time. "Nothing beats an in-room, in-person design session for three, four hours, with a healthy dose of pizza thrown in the middle," he says. Cherepinsky also wants a variety of voices, backgrounds and skills in the room. "e more diverse a team is, the better the outcomes," he said. He also works closely with some humans who have occasionally awkward opinions about his work — the pilots. "Pilots are not shy — trust me," he says. Some, he says, are resistant to the idea of autonomous flight. Others are excited to see what new gadgets and capabilities he can come up with. Steve Schmidt, the chief engineer at Sikorsky, describes Cherepinsky — admiringly — as a "tinkerer." "He can go into his garage, into our labs, and he builds what he invents himself," says Schmidt. "He loves to create, all the way down to the circuit boards, with his own hands, and that tinkering ability really is what brings to life our next products." It's also translated into a lot of intellectual property for the helicopter maker, which is owned by Lockheed Martin — the Maryland-based defense giant that earned nearly $66 billion in revenue in 2022. e third floor of the engineering building at Sikorsky's Stratford headquarters includes a wall honoring patents awarded to employees. "Once you get to a certain number of patents, you get a large picture on that wall," said Schmidt. "e first picture is Igor Sikorsky's." Aer that, he says, you can count on one hand the number of pictures, but Cherepinsky's is one. "He has over 45 patents and a bunch more pending," Schmidt said. Electric flight Now that he's stepped up to the director's chair at Sikorsky Innovations, Cherepinsky's remit is much wider than autonomous flight. And he says Innovations itself, more than a decade into its mission, has also reached a point where the company's needs are changing. Of the department's original three pillars, the innovations in speed are transitioning into production. Many of the improvements in diagnostics or intelligence are also now out in the real world, just as with some of the advances in autonomy. Because it's such a complex challenge, autonomy is likely to remain at the forefront of research for the foreseeable future. Cherepinsky says they are also continuing work on perception, building more robust sensors that can help pilots deal with low-visibility conditions — essential for Coast Guard rescue missions, or conditions over oil rigs. One of the new pillars taking center stage is hybrid electric flight. Earlier this year, Sikorsky announced the development of a hybrid-electric demonstrator project dubbed HEX, a fully-autonomous, hybrid-electric, vertical takeoff and landing prototype. Cherepinsky sees this focus partly as a response to climate change, but also an effort to cut maintenance and other costs — with direct electric drive, there are fewer mechanical components, and also less waste. "It actually opens up a design space," he said. "You see the explosion of different- looking aircra today because of electric flight. Our demonstrator is not going to look like a helicopter." e company plans to release pictures of the project toward the end of this year, and hopes to have it in flight by 2026. It's still a vertical flight machine, he says, "but it's not a helicopter." It's the latest way that Cherepinsky and his team can keep Sikorsky at the cutting edge of rotorcra flight. Continued from previous page Igor Cherepinsky said Sikorsky engineers are developing more robust sensors that can help pilots deal with low-visibility conditions — essential for Coast Guard rescue missions, or conditions over oil rigs. I