The NASA Personal Air Vehicle Challenge is for real, not an April Fool's joke. The event will be held every summer for 5 years. NASA intends it to be the "X Prize" for general aviation to advance light aircraft design, and they place extra importance on it in light of the recent drastic cutbacks in the NASA aeronautics budget. Prize amounts increase annually, as follows: 2007: $250,000, 2008:$300,000, 2009: $400,000, 2010:$500,000 and 2011:$550,000.
The only catch is that the contest gets more difficult each year (as it should). A team from NASA and CAFE carefully set the qualifying requirements to be, yes, stringent, but within reach of the performances already documented by CAFE's long-running Aircraft Performance Reports (APR) program. The APR program was funded by EAA, and was discontinued when Scott Spangler took over EAA's publications because he felt that CAFE's APR reports were, essentially, too 'mathy' and beyond the broader interests of Sport Aviation's readership. Thus, CAFE's funding from EAA Oshkosh ended in 2003, and as an all-volunteer non-profit educational foundation, it has subsisted since then on contributions from its own Board members as well as from Van and Dr. Paul MacCready, among other visionaries. NOTE: NASA provides the cash prizes and gives ZERO dollars to CAFE.
The final NASA approval for the contest rules agreement came just a couple of months ago, but it is now a GO for all 5 years. That this leaves little time to prepare for the Aug 4 2007 event, and, coupled with the ease of winning the first year, should prompt RV flyers to get busy, make the mods needed to qualify, and register for the event. There will only be 16 teams accepted and we already have 11 Letters of Intent from a variety of interesting homebuit designs, though none from Boeing, Northrop or Honda (yet)
The current rules for the event are available at:
www.cafefoundation.org
These rules are being modified to be a bit more lenient in noise levels and MPG requirements, reflecting more recent information obtained by CAFE, and those revisions should be posted within a week or two.
The prototype RV-9A flight test data at CAFE showed it to obtain 30 MPG at 170 mph (way lean of peak EGT) and to qualify for the NASA PAV Challenge on every qualifying metric except noise level. Some builders are already looking at quiet props and special mufflers to fix that.
What are you waiting for?
Brien Seeley, President, CAFE Foundation
NASA PAV Challenge: $250,000 for RV builder
CAFE answers the previous posts on NASA PAV Prize:
Linear Mode
