As a combat engineer he was a natural leader, and he is survived by his wife and two daughters.

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It's rare to find a dictatorial leader like Thomas Watson Sr. of IBM who could engineer the appointment of his son as chief executive, as he did in 1956 even though the Watson family at the time owned only a small percentage of IBM's stock.

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His death hits Makani hard because its founder is irreplaceable: a Stanford-trained engineer who pushed the edge of design, an able leader who snared funding from Google and the ARPA-E, and a handsome windsurfing champion who knew the power of the wind firsthand.

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