The Seeleys and SA board members did themselves proud for this year’s Sustainable Aviation Symposium. Your editor visited the grand ballroom in the San Francisco Bay Pullman Hotel the night before the meeting was to take place. All the tables, chairs and stage were in place, but the room was otherwise bare. Early next morning, your editor trudged downstairs again, to be met with an astonishing sight. At the back of the ballroom, a pair of exotic geometric shapes glowed in blue and green lighting. Somehow, a 50-foot wing and substantial streamlined shape had materialized overnight. Already, attendees were peering up at the extremely twisted tips of the wings and trying to analyze what they saw before them. Aspirational Geometries These elements comprise a pairing of what may be the two lowest-drag objects in aviaton. Their goemetic purity evoke those kind of aspirational feelings reportedly felt by attendees at the 1939 World’s Fair when they saw the Trylon and Perisphere …
Green Flight Challenge Winners
Monday, October 3 was the second day of Nobel Prize announcements, but also marked the Green Flight Challenge Expo, sponsored by Google and staged under the control tower on Moffett Field, home of NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California. The four airplanes that flew in the Challenge at Charles M. Schulz Sonoma Country Airport in Santa Rosa, California were joined by Greg Stevenson’s full-size mockup of his GFC design and a Pipistrel Virus that had won an earlier NASA/CAFE Personal Air Vehicle (PAV) Challenge. Stevenson’s airplane was a reminder that there were numerous entrants that, for a variety of reasons, could not attend. There is a huge number of aircraft in the wings, so to speak, that will fill these pages in the next months and years. 20 exhibitors showed off their visions of a greener future, and three rows of tents protected exhibitors and their displays from the rain that started mid-afternoon. At about 11:00 a.m., attendees were bussed to Building …