Fort Myers Beach sunset

About us

Maritime Flight Dynamics Inc., is based in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. It was founded with the goal of revolutionizing the concept of the offshore powerboat.

Its founder, having reached the apex of a fiberglass fabrication and design career in the offshore powerboat industry, grew bored building the same old re-hashed offshore 'V' bottoms and catamarans whose basic hull design has not changed in more than a quarter of a century. Reaching out just far enough to make radical advances, yet close enough to utilize off-the-shelf components, our goal is no less than to establish a historical milestone in the history of the 'powerboat.'

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David L. Borman

Founder and President

David has more than thirty years' boat building experience ranging from his first mini hydroplane at age twelve to large high-performance offshore racing sail catamarans. He has built jumbo charter boats and top-tier custom offshore powerboats (including several years working with protégés of Don Arronow). He spent many years long distance cruising and performed charter work as a US Coast Guard yacht captain. David has managed to draw from boating worlds whose boundaries seldom overlap. As an aside, he grew up playing in US Navy fighter jet junkyards (and occasionally, Navy SEAL obstacle courses). David's father would often take him to the fighter bases for weekend stays, where his father was primarily responsible for electronics, electronic warfare systems, radar, weapons systems, and general flight maintenance of the legendary McDonald Douglas F-4 Phantom. Childhood memories like that never go away.

David's work and expertise has been sub-contracted to many top national boat-builders. His work has been featured in Miami Herald, Va. Pilot/Ledger Star, Chesapeake Bay Magazine, French Multihull publication, HotBoat magazine, Poker Runs magazine, Popular Mechanics, Powerboat magazine (front cover and feature article), seen on all three national television networks, The Thomas Edison Laboratory Museum, and appeared on ESPN2, the Travel Channel, and Speedvision. He enjoys fond memories of being vice president and construction committee chairman of the Upper Keys Habitat for Humanity.

David has labored for over nine years, developing the initial concept, personally financing the project, model building and testing (both in cyberspace and in the real world), organizing the dozens and dozens of volunteer engineers and special 'helpers' (many of whom are at, or are retired from: NASA, US Navy, Los Alamos, Grumman Aerospace, Lockheed/ Martin Marrietta and a myriad of other organizations), final plug and mold building and finishing part production and assembly.

David is happily married to his amazing wife Liza, without whose support this project would have certainly been impossible. They have three children: twin girls Asia and Brittany, and son Hunter. All three have grown up assuming ALL boats should have wings...

Kenneth Kasten

Vice President

Growing up partly on Sanibel Island, Florida, Ken has turned a life long obsession with both sail and power boating into a national APBA championship, offshore series. Add to that many years' experience in high performance 'formula' automobile racing. Living just down the street from his best friend's professional driving school, Ken has found himself as one of only maybe thirty people on the planet professionally qualified to drive a boat with wings.

Ken Kasten and David Borman first became acquainted when David was helping Chris Reindel redesign and rebuild most of the country's fleet of V-24 Oke Mannerfelt-designed 'Bat boats'. This was obviously providence. David provided Ken an operational test bed to hone the peculiar driving techniques of boats with wings, allowing him to teach others. For David, it enabled him to put his (by now several years' old) theories of constructing and designing boats with wings into actual practice.

Ken is an established Sanibel Island business owner - for twenty years he has supervised mechanical crews servicing exotic automobiles. Ken is married to Kathy and they have three children between them: Gregg, Emily and Caden.

Stu Allison

Chief Financial Officer

A man of much experience and an important mentor to David Borman.

Stu is the US Navy's number one A-6 carrier pilot and a mission-planning specialist for the Defense Department. He is also a military accident investigator for NASA, the X-plane project, and more. With nearly 700 carrier landings behind him, and knowing more than a little something about aircraft with cables attached, Stu was in charge of the towline during the final rough water scale test series for Maritime Flight Dynamics. As David recalls, upon completion of the test series Stu gave him a big kiss on the lips! As Stu was heard to comment: he "had never seen an 'aircraft' so passively stable," and "with no active aeronautical control surfaces" at that.

Interestingly, longer ago than we would care to recall, Stu knew of David's father's work with the Phantom squadrons. He flew his A-6 above the same fighter bases where below, David was playing and dreaming of things to come. Stu has grown-up children.

R. Richard Heppe

Senior Adviser

After graduating from aeronautical schools at Stanford and the California Institute of Technology, Heppe spent virtually his entire career with Lockheed Aircraft Company (now Lockheed Martin) where he was closely associated with more than a dozen major aircraft design and development programs.

These included the sleek, futuristic Mach 2 F-104 Starfighter, the highly successful submarine-chasing S-3A Viking, the US Navy's P-3C and its Canadian variant, the Aurora. Heppe also worked on the first radar-evading stealth fighter, the F-117 Nighthawk, and his personal baby, the US Air Force's latest fighter, the F-22 Raptor. All except the Starfighter are still flying in the 21st century.

Heppe was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and is a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), where he was elected "The Man of the Year" in 1997. He and Richard Cook worked closely together for many years.

Richard K. Cook

Senior Adviser

Former senior White House aide to President Richard M. Nixon, Capitol Hill aide and Senior Vice President of the former Lockheed Corporation.

After starting the computerization of congressional committees with the Library of Congress' fabulous "Thomas" system more than forty years ago, Cook pioneered targeted Internet lobbying years ago for the former satellite communications company PanAmSat Corporation (now Intelsat).

Richard has been working (gratis) behind the scenes with us since 2006. For more information on Richard, see "Who's Who in America."