“Exhilarating and thought provoking; a story of global adventure built on an insider’s understanding of aviation, the aerospace industry, and climate change.”
— Dr. Ben Zaitchik
Associate Professor, Earth and Planetary Sciences, John's Hopkins University, Maryland
Synopsis
Not For Sale! is the story of Ravi Kumar and Caitlyn Mariko, both first generation immigrants and graduate students at Cornell. Avid fans of Carl Sagan, they knew from the moment they saw each other at the Y in Ithaca that they had found their soul mate. It is the thrilling and exciting story of their journey from their homelands in India and Japan, through the beautiful campus of Cornell on the banks of Lake Cayuga in upstate New York, getting married, becoming parents of three daughters, and achieving recognition as world-renowned scientists and inventors of a new aerospace material that would revolutionize the design of airplanes and the engines that power them.
Not For Sale! is also the story of Bill MacMillan and Dave Ward, two of the brilliant and ambitious captains of aviation industry, one-time colleagues, but now fierce competitors, who would stop at nothing to annihilate each other. Dave Ward had lost the battle for the top job to Bill MacMillan at United Electric and was now running General Technologies, United’s competitor and an underdog in the very lucrative and large aero-engine market. They both saw the new material invented by the Kumars as the arrow they needed in their quiver to win the great engine war.
Caught in between were Dr. Ravi Kumar, the aerospace engineer and Dr. Caitlyn Mariko, his life partner and an expert in Artificial Intelligence. They found themselves in the middle of this deadly war between not only the two rivals but also the Chinese. The Chinese saw this new material as their ticket to get into the aero-engine market from which they had thus far been shut off and wanted to capture it just as they had done with many of the other American industries. They all wanted to get an exclusive right contract for the Kumars new invention, and they wanted it in time for the new engine scheduled to be launched in three months.
The launch clock was ticking fast and to be competitive, the contenders must have the new material which would cut down the fuel burn by half and the climate damaging pollutants by three fourth. Not having the new material was not an option.
The stakes could not be higher. The husband-wife team, worried about the climate change and its long-lasting impact on the quality of life for the generation of their three daughters and the generations that come after them, refused to sign the exclusive right contract. They wanted this new revolutionary material to be as widely available as allowed by the laws of their adopted homeland – the United States.
This did not sit well with the two titans and the Chinese. They unleashed a reign of terror on the Kumars and their family forcing them on a hair-raising worldwide flight for their lives that took them from their hometown Ithaca to Marseille, Casablanca, Palermo, Darjeeling and finally Beijing. The critical three-month launch clock was continuing to tick. Their only hope for survival was to run it down before the professional hit teams, let loose by the companies, ferret them out and force them into submission.
The attacks on the Kumars became deadlier as the clock wound down but they managed to remain standing. In desperation, the two American titans and the Chinese joined forces and with just 12 hours remaining on the clock, they pulled out all stops and hit them where it hurt most and where they least expected.
Did the Kumars survive this final attack? Did Dave Ward get his revenge on his arch enemy Bill MacMillan? Did the Chinese wrestle the most lucrative engine contract from the Americans and further their standing as the most industrialized nation on the planet? And what about the frightening growth of the climate damaging pollutants – did the new material help arrest it?
Answers to these questions and much more in Not For Sale!
