I'm an entomologist and was surprised to see the Chrysalis name used.

From : Don Stackhouse

Me. It was really quite a logical choice, if you know a little about our company's history.

'Way back in '92, Joe and I were both working at Hartzell Propeller, and both involved in R/C as a hobby (in fact, purely by coincidence we both started in R/C in 1969). We'd both been experimenting with 1.5 meter R/C HLG's, trying all the "latest and greatest" on the market and coming away very disappointed.

We collaborated on a design of our own, and six fuselages, 7 tails, 8 wings and about 150 hours on the computer later, we froze the design of what really was a breakthrough airplane for that class.

Up till that point, there were built-up HLG's that could float on almost nothing but had no range or penetration, and sheeted foam winged HLG's that had penetrated well and had good range, but couldn't thermal on anything less than a "Texas brick-lifter". The common wisdom was that it was possible to have one or the other of those qualities, but an airplane that could penetrate, range and still float was in violation of the laws of physics. Our model shot that idea full of holes. It was light, floated as well as the built up models, but could also launch, penetrate and range like the other sheeted foam models.

After all that work developing it, we thought that maybe some of the other club members might like one, and then there was that Northeast Sailplane Products place, maybe they might like to sell a few and help us recoup a little of our investment.

The only question was what to call it. We'd already picked a name for our company (Joe's idea, "DJ Aerotech", as in "Don and Joe", except if I'd thought of it I would have made it "Joe and Don"), but we needed a company logo, and we needed a name for the new model. I also wanted to come up with a distinctive paint scheme for my personal ship.

I was sitting in front of my computer one morning, thinking about what to call a model that had the float of a butterfly (and a lot of it's flying style, too, the way it danced around in the slightest of air currents), but tremendous range. In one of those "Eureka!" moments, the image popped into my head, and instantly I knew the perfect name, the logo for our company, and the paint scheme for my personal ship! What butterfly is famous for incredible, globe-spanning range? The Monarch, of course. Not bad as far as the other connotations of that name as well.

I immediately sketched the idea for our logo, a butterfly (wearing helmet and goggles and a big smile, if you ever get to see it sufficiently enlarged to see the details) shown in flight superimposed over a globe.

Many years before, I'd made some extremely small (3/8" span) kites that were scale models of a Monarch butterfly, complete with the entire paint scheme including all the black lines and white spots (as well as the antennae, with little knobs on their ends!), so I was very familiar with the details. In 1992 we didn't have all that fancy "morphing" software to do it for me, so I mentally had to "morph" the fore-wing paint scheme so that the row of doubled white spots followed the wing's trailing edge, and I morphed the aft-wing's patterns to fit the planform for the V-tail. BTW, only a few Monarchs were ever made with that paint scheme, and I did most of them. It takes about 20-25 man-hours of work to hand-paint all the details, which is an awful lot to invest in a model that in a competition environment also seems to mimic the Monarch butterfly's durability and lifespan. Really good HLG's do tend to wear out.

The Monarchs have been out of production for a long time, so there are no photos of this paint scheme on our website anymore, but I could probably take some and e-mail them to you if you'd like to see it. The original is pretty beat up, but I still have it hanging on the wall here, along with the prototype 2-meter Monarch that carries the same paint scheme.

This established the pattern of naming our sailplane designs after butterflies, such as the "Wizard", one of our later series.  The series that replaced both of those was originally going to be called the Emperor series, but we decided that wasn't easy enough to say, so we opted for "Spectre" instead. Our first  .75 meter "Mosquito" class sailplane was the "Nymph", and the no-holds-barred competition follow-on to that was to be called the "Harvester" (a lot of our competitors had taken up our pattern of naming airplanes after bugs, and as you probably know, a "Harvester" is a small carnivorous moth that EATS OTHER BUGS!!).

When it came to developing a built-up, lower cost sibling for the Monarch, intended for beginners, sport flyers, and for folks looking for a good first-choice for beginning the metamorphosis from whatever they had been flying into the unique world of model sailplanes, the name was obvious: "Chrysalis". Once again, I opted for a "scale" paint scheme inspired by the chrysalis of a Monarch butterfly. The colors aren't scale, but the pattern is the same, a luminous solid color overall, with a two-tone stripe on the wingtip that mimics the stripe on the base of the cap of the butterfly's chrysalis. That's the plane in the photos on the Chrysalis HLG page on our website.

Don Stackhouse
DJ Aerotech