Dr. Brien Seeley, President of the CAFE Foundation, has made the following announcement: “The Chief designer of the F-22 Raptor has prepared another spectacular design: The World’s Fastest Electric Vehicle. This new aircraft design will be presented along with the other outstanding talks at next week’s CAFE Electric Aircraft Symposium, April 27, 28 in Santa Rosa, California (Sonoma Wine Country). This symposium, dedicated to the burgeoning new domain of emission-free flight, now has representatives from Boeing, Bosch, IBM, Honda, Nortrhop-Grumman, Japan Air Lines, Rolls-Royce, Siemens, Aerovironment, FAA, Cummins, Cessna, Lycoming and many other companies enrolled to participate.” The high-speed electric may be a response to Ivo Boscarol’s pledge to put up $100,000 of his Pipistrel G-4 winnings at last year’s Green Flight Challenge for the first supersonic electric aircraft. Program Details can be found here. There is still time to pre-register online here.
Pipistrel’s Flight Through Wine Country
Brien Seeley forwards a video of Pipistrel’s historic, Collier Trophy nominated electric powered flight. He notes, “It applies its performance data file and a weather map overlay to annotate scenes of the visual beauty of the Sonoma Wine Country,” a feature that will also delight visitors to Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport when they attend the electric aircraft flight demonstrations that are part of this year’s Electric Aircraft Symposium. The Team will present details of their aircraft and its achievement at the 6th Annual CAFE Electric Aircraft Symposium on April 27, 2012 in Santa Rosa, for which registration can be obtained online. The video will remind one of the weather overlays Dr. Jack Langelaan created for his autonomous soaring exercises, and which were also shown to be helpful in general aviation flight planning and execution.