Method Seven’s First-Ever Limited Edition Pilot Sunglasses:

The Wasabi + Experimental, in Collaboration with Test Pilot Elliot Seguin

By Annamarie Buonocore

Grow meets pilot, at last. Method Seven’s new limited edition Wasabi and Experimental pilot sunglasses combine the ingenuity of lightweight, shatterproof lenses with the iconic aesthetic of their best-selling grow frame, the Evolution. The result: an effortlessly cool new style designed to protect pilots in and out of the cockpit.

In an exciting announcement last month, Method Seven said, “We’re dropping only 500 pairs (250 of each lens) of these ultra-limited glasses, available in shatterproof SUNp or FLT lenses. And, in the spirit of charitable giving and advancing the study of aviation, we are also donating a portion of the proceeds from each pair to the Society of Experimental Test Pilots (SETP) Scholarship Foundation to benefit the children of deceased and disabled test pilots. Plus, a matching donation will be made by Method Seven on behalf of Elliot Seguin, our chief collaborator on this exciting new launch.”

Seguin is a world-renowned Experimental Test Pilot, Engineer, father of two, and Method Seven Ambassador. To date, he’s flown over 100 different types of aircraft, completed 13 first flights, and has set six world records. His congeniality, expert skill, and devotion to the field of aviation make him an iconic and remarkable figure in the community; something Method Seven has worked to recapture in the sleek design of their first-ever limited edition frame for pilots.

Inspired by Seguin’s love for Method Seven’s Evolution SunP grow frame, and the company’s dream to finally re-imagine this best-selling style into an epic pair of flight glasses for aviators, the release of the Wasabi and Experimental is a collaboration that has been in the making for years. Enrique Sifuentes, industrial designer and illustrator, designed the distinctively eye-catching artwork on these limited edition frames.

The Wasabi, in cool silver and classic black, stands out with dazzle flair hinges reminiscent of Seguin’s racing aircraft Siren and its mesmerizing pattern.

The Experimental, in bold orange and black, pays homage to the aesthetics of historical test pilot culture, orange flight suits, and the SR-71 Blackbird test flight program. 

In Flight USA is proud to have had the opportunity to interview Sequin about his career and exceptional dedication to aviation. And yes, during his interview, he wore his sunglasses featuring the collaborative frame launched (with Sequin) to benefit SETP charity.

IF USA: Tell me a little about your performing career and how it got started…

ES: Performer is a loose term for me… The work that I do is contract flight test work, which ends up being pretty public because we have a strong social media presence. That’s where the ‘performative’ aspect comes in.

The broad view is that I am an engineer by training. I went to college in New York and then moved out here to work for Burt Rutan. Engineering can be stereotypically stuck in a cubical and flying can stereotypically be stuck in the front of a Boeing airplane flying a long haul route. Building airplanes can have you being stuck with a bucket of rivets on an assembly line. What really excited me, that I learned working for Burt in Mojave with Scaled (Composites), is that the flight test role allows you to play between all of those circles. That was something I really related to, so about 15 years ago, I made the shift from engineering into flight testing and being a test pilot.  

Not having come from a military background, it was the combination of air racing and working for Burt Rutan that helped me make the jump into the flight test role. As you can imagine, that is a pretty competitive sphere. You gotta have a way to earn your stripes and that’s the way I earned mine.

IF USA: What kind of aircraft do you test? 

ES: I cut my teeth working for Burt and I worked on everything from dropping spaceships for Richard Branson to building custom airplanes for other customers ­– some of which we can talk about more than others ­– to hauling weird payloads to old race tracks over restricted areas at Edwards (AFB) for formal customers, like Northrup (Grumman) or AFRL (Air Force Research Laboratory). That was my day job and nights and weekends were for doing contract flight tests. Our specialty, I would say, is Reno and record-setting which means a lot of engine development. But more and more, what we are known is for helping guys who have been building airplanes for so long that maybe they are not as physically fit for flying as they were when they started the project, and being a homebuilder myself, I really like helping those guys turn a dream into a real flying airplane.

IF USA: So you do testing for homebuilts?

 ES: We do homebuilts, a lot of weird one-off stuff. We just got back from Scotland, doing a deployment in the electric hybrid aircraft and then there are a lot of projects we can’t talk about so much. Let’s just say they are similar projects just on a bigger budget. If you’re working as a teacher, you’re going to build an RV with a weird motor in it. If you’re a millionaire, you may end up with something that is exceptionally strange looking with a weird powerplant and weird aerodynamics with millions of dollars invested in it. We kind of jump between those spheres.

IF USA: Tell me about your role with the Reno Air Races. Do you have to do testing before certain race planes can fly?

ES: My favorite way to say it is, there’s this magical thing in aviation. It’s kind of dominated by strong personalities. You finally end up with this wickedly cool machine that you always knew you belonged in and you land at the airport and you draw a little bit of a crowd. And then you’re sitting across from the fuel pump and another cool looking airplane taxies up and he’s going to ask you about your performance and you’re going to say a number and you know you saw that number maybe once but you would be hard pressed to think you’re going to see it again when it comes to climb rate, efficiency, horsepower or speed, or whatever, and just between us, whatever you say (to the guy who just taxied up) is going to be a lie.

What I love about Reno is its ability to slow airplanes down. You put everybody on the same balancing bar to evaluate the aircraft. Another little paraphrase I like, we all love the SR71. The SR71 is the baddest machine there ever was… so fast… pop pop pop, so rad! I would think you would be hard pressed to find another airplane that was designed at the same time with the same budget to run on the same course effectively for whatever the mission was, as the SR71. So can you really say that is the baddest aircraft ever? If you say the F15 is the baddest thing ever, well nothing on the other side of the equation was designed at the same time with the same resources and technology. So is it really the baddest?

What else I love about Reno is that it’s a level playing field and as a result, one of the few places in aviation where not only can you compare aircraft, pilots, mechanics, (and) engineers directly but you can do it in front of a crowd with a lot of enthusiasm that drives a good test.  So I was able to find customers that needed good flight tests from Reno early on and that helped me cut my teeth. If you’ve got a speed mod, the old joke is, I put a new wingtip on and I got 20 miles an hour. The joke is the reason you got 20 miles an hour is that’s how big the increments are on your airspeed indicator. And then there’s really no way to know if that’s the case. Last year maybe you ran a different motor or a different prop, etc. So we come in and help customers quantify that. Did something actually make the aircraft faster or is there some kind of weird engine system? Is there something we see that we can do or come up with a plan to help the aircraft run faster on the course? The downside is that with Reno you’ve got the whole year to think about it… that silly mistake you made. Reno demands better testing up front. That’s the performance side. The other side is the safety side. There were a couple of recent accidents that were pretty dramatic and raised the FAA’s awareness of the whole thing. They now demand some testing before the airplanes are brought out and we help with that, as well.

IF USA: Can you tell us a story of an exhilarating experience while testing an aircraft?

ES: We had a couple of really hairy ones just this year. There are many risks involved in flight testing and sometimes things don’t go well. We had a couple of crashes. It’s part of the job… we got through it.

IF USA: Your relationship with Method Seven, they are sponsors right? Why do you need sponsors to do what you do?

ES: Great question! I think it is two-fold. Number one, with our visibility we have the opportunity to help other companies that are doing interesting and important things and we have a couple sponsors onboard and a lot of it is just me trying to point the eyeballs that we have toward products I care about. So in the direct context of Method Seven, what has consistently impressed me about Method Seven and especially James (Cox), the founder (and CEO), is the respect and genuine curiosity he has for the aviation community and that he was interested in showing that genuine respect when developing products (sunglasses). It was that kind of dedication to detail that interested me. Method Seven is a technical company with a technical product that I believe sets them apart. As an engineer I think that’s cool, but there is a lot more that goes into marketing a product than great tech. I need to be able to tell a story about why and how a product helps a pilot. You can steamroll that but I haven’t seen Method Seven do that. Instead what I have seen is very early on we had a record-setting event in Mojave, so I had an airshow that I ran in Mojave, and eventually we had a record-setting component where we set 25 records over the course of two or three years. Method Seven came and out just wanted to be there. The way that I interpreted that is they had a piece of technology that could benefit the aviation community and rather than rolling out a project and throwing a bunch of money at it, hitting everyone on the face with it, James came out to learn and understand about the (aviation) community and what pilots wanted. He had respect for people like us. Unfortunately, aviation is a kind of shirking, not growing thing, so if you can inspire genuine respect, that is valuable.

IF USA: Method Seven is a sunglass company. What do you have to say about the product?

ES: I wear the glasses and I wear them a lot. What I like about them is there’s the eagle-eye stuff and every fighter pilot talks about how great his vision is… we all get tired of that. Obviously there is a lot of input that a pilot relies on that he gets through his eyeballs. But we’re also typically flying with lots of sunlight around us. So the combination of needing to protect your eyes while getting as much of the information you need through your eyes to get your job done well is an interesting design problem. What (mineral glass) does is blocks the light that hurts while letting the rest of the light in that is needed to fly the airplane. For that reason, I think it’s an exceptional product.

IF USA: Are you based in Mojave, California?

ES: Yes. I do a lot of work in Northern California for Sanders Aeronautics, who restores World War II aircraft, some of which end up getting raced and that is why they are known in the racing community. I help them with a pod for generation four aircraft around the world.

IF USA: Outside of your working life, what kind of aircraft do you like to fly for fun?

ES: Oh man, you’re not going to like this answer… If you would have asked me that five years ago I would have had a list of fire-breathing monsters that kept me up at night. I worked for John Sharp for a while and wanted nothing more than to fly that (Nemesis) NXT. I worked on Checkmate, which is an Unlimited Class racer, 480-mile an-hour airplane that was designed to go 270-miles-an-hour. That airplane used to haunt me in my sleep. When I worked for Burt Rutan, I really focused on low-tech solutions to high-tech problems, so I really loved Aries, a ground-attack airplane which is designed to be orders-of-magnitude cheaper to build and operate than an A10 but be able to pack the same punch. Homebuilder solutions to the aviation world has been a big part of my life. But something significant happened a few years ago, and I’m sure you can relate or understand. I now have two boys, (ages) 2 and 5 and like any other pilot-dad, I get really nervous about the fact that dad is in aviation and maybe the boys will hate aviation so the idea of properly introducing them to it in a way that is accessible and interesting is really important to me. We’ve been doing a lot of flying and I know we’re all going to yawn right now, but we just took ownership of a Mooney M20. It’s kind of old and has a little patina to it but you can put the boys in it and last weekend I went flying with them and they were fighting over who could sit in the front seat. I’m not sure there are words for the affect that had on me. That’s kind of embarrassing for a guy who is supposed to be talking about being a bad-ass test pilot.

IF USA: No, that’s a great answer. With the pilot shortage, we probably need more test pilots, as well. What advice can you give to a student interested in test flying?

ES: Test flying has always had the problem of looking very sexy on the outside but being a lot of hard technical work on the inside. So now as we move from experimental test flights of the 1950s and 60s and with new critters coming out or like when I was working on Spaceship 1 and Spaceship 2 as a test pilot with all the reversible flight controls flying rocket-powered airplanes ­– totally amazing ­– to now moving into more autonomous systems in electric vertical takeoff. The role of the test pilot is more uncertain than it has ever been. Of course we all followed the movie, The Right Stuff, 50 years ago and that dynamic was played out, as well. The joke is that the pilot needs a window even though he cannot fly the rocket ship. I think the most important thing is that if you’re thinking about getting into test flying, to be a valuable test pilot you have to have a deep technical understanding of the vehicle that is being tested. So rather than pursing Right Stuff, Chuck Yeager, I’m the god of all aviation, it’s about a deep technical understanding in the vehicle combined with the hands and feet required to put the airplane where it needs to be and to get the required data. So what that probably means is a long-term relationship with a product line. In most cases, you’re going to be a single-engine reset guy in Part 23, or you’re going to be a front line fighter guy, or in our case a weird-engineer-challenges guy or certification guy. What’s nice about that is that if you step back, instead of looking at it as being a challenge trying to predict where the market is going to go and developing yourself for an unknown future, instead you can focus on what really interests you technically and getting really smart on that and let the market come to you.

            The other thing that I think is really important is as a test pilot people really focus on the risk appetite. And, the natural risk appetite reduction with age. So if you go and pull 24-year-olds with 250 hours on a CPL, a commercial pilot’s license, and ask them if they’d be interesting in doing some high-risk flying with a huge payoff, whether in cash or prestige, you’re going to get a lot more yeses than if you ask a 45-year-old. Unfortunately, for that reason 24-year-old test pilots aren’t that valuable and 45-year-old test pilots are. What that means is that if you want to be in the test pilot world and you’re 24, you’re going to have to wait. But that means you’re going to have more time to develop those deep technical skills.

IF USA: What kind of skills do you need? What kind of education did you get?

ES: My education is mechanical engineering and I worked for Burt Rutan for 10 years doing research and development aircraft. If I was going to take it from a broader sense, I would simplify the answer to design, build and test. Design is the engineering side. Its understanding first principles (science) that adds up to how this idea is going to work. The build phase is how to lay composite, how cylinders fail, how gear boxes fail, how you repair them, whether or not it is significant enough, and then there’s the test phase, which is understanding not only how to operate the airplane but how to put it in the place where the engineer needs it to be to understand it. The problem with that answer – with the design, build test answer – is that the actual, most important skill set of the test pilot is not the ability to understand those things but the ability to communicate those things with the smart people in each of those skill sets.

So the most common argument I have is with the owner or the finance guy or the schedule guy who is trying to convince me that we need to take unnecessary risks because we’re going to run out of money or we have a milestone, or, or, or… And you can’t talk to a finance guy like you talk to an engineer.  Then they’ll bring in the engineer in and he’ll tell you why he thinks it safe. He’s going to use engineering jargon. Now we have to talk like an engineer. Now we have to install something on the airplane and we have to go talk to the fabricator or mechanic down on the floor. It’s that communication skill that is not natural for engineers that is absolutely critical to being a test pilot.

IF USA: That is really good advice. Thank you so much. We appreciate your time and wish you continued success in your career.

Editor’s Note: To learn more about Method Seven, visit the company website at https://methodseven.com. To learn more about the Society of Experimental Test Pilots (SETP) Scholarship Foundation visit www.setp.org or https://www.setp.org/foundation/scholarship-foundation/. Lastly, you can find dynamic videos featuring Elliot Seguin on YouTube.