HISTORY

The key members of N2 Aero, Olen and Greg Nelson, have had a long history in the design, development, certification, sales, and marketing of custom noise and thermal control products.

This history began in 1988, when Olen Nelson, a private pilot concerned that the high level of noise in his personal light aircraft would permanently damage his hearing, started testing a number of materials he had come upon during his career developing high-performance fire protection garments and equipment. After extensive transmission-loss testing, Olen had identified a configuration that, while only ¼" thick, was able to reduce noise by 3-6 dB.

From this beginning, Olen started to develop the noise reduction "kit" approach that is still in use today. The product line has its roots in the small aircraft market, but was quickly matured into a range of offerings for larger transport category aircraft. With the advent of the Boeing Business Jet (BBJ) in the late 1990s, and the Airbus Corporate Jet (ACJ) not much later, the market was ripe for very high performance noise reduction systems. Also at this time, FAA oversight of VIP aircraft modifications became much more stringent, requiring much higher degrees of engineering definition, quality control, and airworthiness instructions. It became very important for all specialty vendors to develop fully supported, engineered, FAA approved kits.

When Greg joined Olen in 1994, he brought the technical expertise that enabled the two of them to create and maintain the engineering, quality, and operations infrastructure necessary to produce STC-PMA kits efficiently, as well as the refined design, analysis, and automation techniques that streamlined product design and development. Initially, they were competing with "materials only" vendors who relied on the completion centers for all engineering, fabrication, testing, and certification. This labor-intensive model required significant investment on the part of the completion centers, including the obtaining of acoustic expertise and a large amount of physical labor, and it became very clear to many of them that their highly trained personnel would soon be stretched thin. Alternatively, the "Kit" model offered substantial labor savings and all but eliminated the engineering, testing, and certification responsibilities of the completion center. With this "Kit" model, along with their applied acoustics expertise, Olen and Greg were able to corner the domestic market by providing very good results, high success rates, and very competitive pricing, and begin to make strong inroads in the international markets.

In their professional careers Olen and Greg have successfully designed and implemented noise reduction systems on most makes and models of transport category aircraft, including followingAirbus, Boeing, Bombardier, Bell Helicopter, BAe, Beechcraft, Cessna, Dassault FalconJet, Gulfstream, Sikorsky and others.