Fly, and Save the World
Last weekend, The Cafe Foundation kicked off their own version of the X-Prize, challenging inventors and engineers to create a viable Personal Air Vehicle (PAV) that can be used to overcome the grid-locked traffic problem that plagues much of urban civilization and wasted 6.5 BILLION gallons of fuel last year…
The Cafe Foundation, a nonprofit group of flight test engineers, on Saturday will kick off its first NASA-sponsored contest of personal aircraft vehicles, or PAVs, which is being held at the Charles Schultz Sonoma County Airport in California. The goal of the challenge will be to test the fuel efficiency and speed of PAVs–high-tech two-seater planes–so they could one day serve as a more economical, environmentally friendly way for people to get around and circumvent auto gridlock, according to Brian Seeley, president of the Cafe Foundation.
NASA is involved, fronting the quarter-million in prize money.
NASA is putting up $250,000 in prize money for the weeklong contest as part of its so-called Centennial Challenges, a series of government-sponsored competitions that support space exploration and aviation technologies in private industry. It has staked a total of $2 million for the five annual PAV challenges, which were slated to begin last year but were delayed.
“We’re burning up into smoke 6.7 billion gallons of gas annually (from being) stuck in traffic jams,” said Seeley, whose Cafe Foundation was chosen by NASA in 2005 to run the PAV challenges.
“These air vehicles can travel in three dimensions without any traffic jams, and the computer technology today enables travel that can be on demand at speeds three to four times faster than cars with equivalent gas mileage.”
In this competition, contestants will run their PAVs on aviation fuel. But Seeley said some contestants for next year’s competition are already working on PAVs that run on alternative energy sources such as batteries or fuels like biodiesel, made from vegetable oil. (A biodiesel PAV could go 900 miles on 25 gallons, for example.)
Here are some details about the navigation system, a description of the contest, and an overview of the goals and genesis of the whole thing…
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