Nobody Wins GoFly Prize, But Personal Flight Is Coming

Feb 29 (Leap day, of course) saw the finals of the GoFly Prize, a competition primarily sponsored by Boeing to produce small vehicles for personal flight. The rules required a fairly small form factor (8’ sphere, roughly) and a 30 minute flight time, along with a number of parameters.

Competitors included a range of small entrepreneurs, university teams and maverick individuals, and entries ranged from concepts and models to full sized flying vehicles. The competition, held at my old stomping grounds at Moffett Field, CA, produced no winner of the million dollar prize, so competition will continue.

In a way, it reminded me a bit of the original DARPA Grand Challenge, in which a similar set of scrappy teams competed and nobody won. 2 years later, 5 teams produced working robocars and set us on the path we’re now on. However, in this case, there are probably over 200 companies in the e-VTOL space, many who have already produced real flying vehicles that could have won this contest other than on size, so this was definitely a group of underdogs.

A $100K prize was awarded to a Japanese team named “teTra” which produced an unusual 4-fan hoverbike design, where the fans are angled different configurations in liftoff and travel. I am not sure if teTra has yet to actually fly — they have no videos on their website.

The main competition was Feb 28, which I did not attend, and reportedly 3 vehicles flew. On Feb 29, they had a demo day open to the public which attracted a large crowd. Two vehicles were scheduled to do demo flights for the crowd, but wind of 15 knots scrubbed the demos. The teams themselves felt able to fly in those winds but the airfield managers nixed that. The crowd was placated with a mini airshow with a biplane and National Guard C130 and helicopter.

Beyond that, the attraction was booths from all the entrants, most showing a prototype or scale model of some kind, and a few showing real vehicles. Most designs were, frankly, not very far along. One sad story came with the Australian team from RMIT in Melbourne. RMIT cancelled all overseas travel due to Covid-19 panic, so they could not ship their vehicle or themselves, but the team members bought tickets privately to show off their models. At least nobody I saw in the crowd was wearing a mask, though the day before news had broken of community transfer of the virus in Silicon Valley.

The 3 demo vehicles on display were the teTra, a spider-like stand-on drone from DragonAir, and a unit with a lawn chair placed amusingly on 4 large ducted fans. An interesting aspect of the DragonAir team was their pilot Mariah Cain. Cain is a short woman who thus weighs less than most male pilots would. While the contest rules require adding extra ballast weight to even out pilot weight, in the real world, I predict that female pilots, because of their smaller average size, will dominate the world of e-VTOL flying until such time as things are automated. If you want a piloted taxi or ambulance, and every kilogram counts, the lighter the pilot the better.

The “hoverbike” concept — essentially a scaled up drone with a passenger seat — is a real category in the e-VTOL world. While their range is low, they are small and comparatively easy to build. Getting stable flight from a multirotor drone is effectively a solved problem. The more serious teams attempted vehicles that combine multirotor vertical takeoff with quick conversion to horizontal fixed-wing flight. Only fixed wing flight is highly efficient, and you need that to fly 30 minutes. But this is a lot more work.

Nonetheless there were models and protypes running the gamut from a flying saucer (the round shape making the most of the spherical size constraint, and not just for looks) to a saddle-mounted giant turbine with ducts, a strange echo of a Harrier jumpjet in miniature.