Greg Cole is the owner of Windward Performance, which manufactures his own ultralight glider, the Sparrowhawk.

Greg has a long interest in aviation. In fact he can not really think of a time when his thoughts were not on airplanes. Having built lots of models, most scratch built, as a young person he immediately gravitated to soaring flight, first with free flight and later radio control sailplanes. It took a long time but now he soars in his own SparrowHawk. He is having a great time trying to drive his personal best distance up every year.

He has a mechanical engineering degree from the University of North Dakota, where his father was a physics professor. A masters degree in Aerospace Engineering followed from the University of Notre Dame. There he specialized in low Reynolds number Aerodynamics.

At Notre Dame he met Joe Mergan, former chief engineer of Curtis Aircraft. This relationship leads to a job at McCauley designing aircraft propellers after finishing his degree. There he had the fine honor of working with Hank Borst and made some progress in propeller designs and has a US patent dealing with propellers.

He spent some time with Cirrus Design, mostly working on the ST-50 project.

After that Lancair brought him to Oregon where he resides today. While at Lancair he was Chief Engineer of Research and Development and brought the Columbia 300 through design and certification. The Columbia 300 was the first new design certified in 17 years and in addition it was a composite aircraft with natural laminar flow airfoils. The Columbia is well known for its exceptional low speed handling qualities and characteristics.

At Lancair he also made contributions to the Legacy design in its aerodynamics and structures. Many elements of this project were also completed after his ten year with Lancair. The Legacy is well known as a very fast two seat aircraft that has been very successful at Reno in the Sports Class.

He then started Windward Performance. Now he had the opportunity to work on the SparrowHawk design. The SparrowHawk was completely tooled up and put into production after its first flight in January 2001.

Windward does a lot of aircraft consulting work and Greg has worked on several very nice consulting projects. One of these was the aerodynamic configuration of the Chanute aerobatic aircraft.

During this period he also worked at Adam Aircraft on the A500 and A700.

The Lancair Evolution is a new design by Greg, having first flown in April 2008. It features a very light carbon structure and the aerodynamics, which feature several new approaches, have proven quite successful. The aircraft performs very well and has exemplary stalling characteristics.

Windward has also produced the Owl unmanned aircraft.

The latest Windward sailplane design is the Perlan but the DuckHawk is in process. The DuckHawk is a very high performance 15m sailplane that features a 30:1 aspect ratio. The DuckHawk tooling is in process.