The 2019 Personal Aircraft Design Academy (PADA) Trophy

Dean Sigler Hybrid Aircraft, SAS, Solar Power, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Honoring John Langford If one stays with a line of work long enough, one will accomplish mighty things.  That’s certainly true for John Langford, Chief Executive Officer for Aurora Flight Sciences.  His decades-long career, start his decades-long career, starting at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and culminating his company partnering with Boeing, has explored almost every aeronautical discipline.  For this perseverance, he was awarded the 2019 Personal Aircraft Design Academy (PADA) Trophy. Aurora Flight Sciences’ Chief Technology Officer, Tom Clancy, was on hand at the 2019 Sustainable Aviation Symposium at UC Berkeley to accept the award for Langford.  Clancy has worked with Langford since their MIT days, building and flying several human-powered aircraft, including the 1974 Daedalus.  That aircraft flew the 74 miles from Crete to Sicily over the Mediterranean Sea, still the human-powered distance record.  He and Langford went on to design, build, and fly an astonishing range of aircraft. Putting solar cells on Daedalus gave them a pilotless airplane …