Project Green Jet - a vision of the future of sailing

The SY 120 rigging is an aero sail, stretched and rotated between two masts, attached to the side edges of the deck. The aero sail is composed of a fixed front edge with the sail sliding verticality and towards the boom, where it is rolled. The sail is trimmed (rolled) with a shaft, located in the boom, with the furling system attached perpendicularly to the shaft. Such a sail enables simple, single-handed steering of a sailboat with the help of custom computer systems.

Sailing boats require a lot of human effort to adjust their settings because weather and wind conditions change so frequently that they consume all of the resources available to sail one properly. Sailing a big boat requires a rugby team of well-trained sailors. “You need 20 athletes to set the sails on a 30 metre sail boat,” says Sifrer, “using dozens of ropes, pulleys, winches, trackers and different types of deck gear.”

Automation and robotic technologies have been evolving rapidly over the last few decades, and are about to replace the aforementioned rugby team, and the time-honoured traditions which transported people and cargoes safely for the last 600 years are about to come under challenge from a new generation of sailing ship, and Sifrer is at the forefront of thinking on where it’s going.

Designer Erik Sifrer believes sailing technology has progressed very little in the last 250 years, pointing out that a conventional sail boat uses sails only 2% of the time and he believes that by automating and continuously changing the settings of the sails, it can continually optimize the energy it captures from the wind and tide. His design concept for Project Green Jet is to make better and more efficient use of the forces of nature.

How to tap the energy of the wind more efficiently

“Wind offers an endless supply of clean energy, so the question is primarily, how can we tap this energy resource more efficiently, and what could the new rig look like in the future? So I started where my last project finished, with a model of the SY 120, then extended and improved it, made it more spectacular and we have just presented it to the public at Dubai International Boat Show 2008under sponsorship of Mides Engineering and Mides-design."

“The Green Jet Project is an evolution of the SY120 concept. We wish to continue presenting new technologies and designs and a new vision of what a sail yacht can be and Green Jet is the next step in putting those thoughts in the water.”

There’s little doubt that the astonishingly beautiful Maltese Falcon is the current torch holder of this concept of automated, intelligent sailing, but Sifrer’s concepts go well beyond the Maltese Falcon’s capabilities in automating the trimming of the sails.

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