Three Personal Flyers You Can Buy

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…Or Invest In We exhibit here three personal flyers you can buy today or within a year or so.  Perhaps that wait might be prolonged in some instances because a few of the makers are also looking for investors.  Recent instances of troubles getting a certain stainless steel electric pickup to market come to mind, for instance.  As always your mileage may vary. Doroni H1-X “Engineered for the new generation of personal mobility,” the Doroni H1-X is a sleek little four-fan runabout that can fit in a two-car garage.  Two pusher propellers help drive if forward.  An owner could roll it out after an overnight charging session and fly up to 60 miles at up to 120 miles per hour, landing and taking off vertically from and to a driveway-size patch. Obviously, with a $300,000 to $400,000 price tag, one expects a well-sorted-out machine that will perform as promised and provide the utmost in safety.  To that end, Doroni suggests …

GoAero Prize Highlights Rescue Missions

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The GoAero Prize has a simple-sounding, but incredibly complex goal: Design and build a safe, portable, robust, autonomy-enabled Emergency Response Flyer. The Vision The Prize’s vision defines the heroes who look past danger, who step in to be, “The difference between triumph… and tragedy, and especially, those who “Use Their Minds to Create technology that Saves Lives.”  There’s $2 million waiting for those who come up with the best solutions.  And the competition promises even greater glory, “This is your chance to make history… and save lives.” GoAero says, “The world needs this,” explaining that, “In the U.S. alone, nearly 4.5 million people live in “ambulance deserts,” in a medical crisis, people in these areas have to wait as long as 25 minutes or more for an emergency medical crew to arrive.” We’ve seen recent examples of how serious such waits can be.  Paradise, California was a thriving community of over 26,000 before the disastrous Camp Creek fire in 2018. …

GoFly Prize Will Have a Sequel

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A well-produced video looking like a Christopher Nolan trailer for an upcoming Batman film — Silverwing’s preview of its coming attraction wraps us in a cocoon-like cockpit with a heads-up display to envy.  Silverwing’s S1 was one of 20 machines to show up at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California for the GoFly Prize flyoff. As Beth Stanton reported in the May issue of Sport Aviation, the gathering represented the best of 854 teams from 103 countries who made it through the first phase of the competition over two years ago.  The attrition rate may seem high unless one considers the difficulty level posed by the contest’s constraints. Beth’s article, “On the Edge of Possibility,” draws its title from a statement by Malcolm Foster, a GoFly judge and mentor, and director of special projects at GKN Aerospace.  He explained the challenge involved: “The eight-and-a-half-foot diameter with current battery technology was right on the edge of possibility.”  He referred to the …

Go Fly’s Phase II Winners

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One complaint frequently heard is that aviation doesn’t necessarily encourage participation by women, despite historical examples from Harriet Quimby to Jeanna Yeager.   GoFly is a competition thought up by Gwen Lighter, a lawyer with degrees from Brown (summa cum laude) and Harvard (cum laude) Universities. It has a $2 million prize package backed by Boeing and others.  Ms. Lighter describes her brainchild as follows: “The $2 million GoFly competition encourages mad scientists and daredevils to come as close as possible to Star Wars’s light cycles, James Bond’s jetpack, Marty McFly’s hoverboard, or any other flying dream.” Five Phase 2 winners exemplify the open rule-book approach around which the contest is organized.  Lighter explained it two years ago in an NPR interview.  “What the device looks like and how it works is up to the innovators.  We do not mandate that it’s something you get into like a car, or something that you strap on your back, or something that you …

GoFly Announces First Round Prize Winners

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Boeing just announced the ten winners of Phase I in its GoFly competition, in which entrants design, build and fly a “personal flying device.”  As Boeing explains, contest rules are designed to enable entrants “To foster the development of safe, quiet, ultra-compact, near-VTOL personal flying devices capable of flying twenty miles while carrying a single person.”  The list of partners and co-sponsors is impressive and includes virtually all major American aviation advocacy groups. As the Green Flight Challenge demonstrated seven years ago, prize money encourages a grand series of investments by individuals in hopes of winning a prize.  In this case, 3,000 entries by 725 teams from 95 countries presented drawings and documents describing their proposed PFD, with a select 10 advancing to Phase II, which will require a demonstration of the proposed machine’s ability to perform as promised. “To be able to engage so many individuals from leading universities, major corporations and startups, and connect them through our community …