While NASA may be relinquishing near space exploration that hasn’t stopped them from doing what it can on Earth to encourage green aviation as it has done in conjunction with the Google-sponsored CAFE Green Flight Challenge.
The CAFE (Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency) Challenge was created to push aircraft engineers to find more efficient airplane designs that could help to bring about a new age of ultra-efficient flight and they now have a winner.
NASA has announced that Team Pipistrel-USA.com has come away the winner and in the process received the single largest prize ever handed out out in aviation history. They got the prize by flying their Pipistrel Taurus G4 over 20 miles in less than two hours and did so using the electrical equivalent of less than one gallon of fuel per passenger. The prize was $1.25 million but that is only part of the story.
What Pipistrel has done is come up with an all electric plane that is more efficient than a fuel based plane, and they weren’t the only one’s to do it.
Consider: The challenge asked teams to average 100 miles per hour over two hours, and to do so on the equivalent of one gallon of gas. Not only did Pipistrel manage this, but so did California-based e-Genius with its electric-powered plane (for which it netted a second place prize of $120,000).
The kicker: both teams did so on just a little more than a half-gallon of fuel equivalent. That means both Pipistrel and e-Genius did twice as well as NASA and CAFE asked them to do (and Pipistrel slightly better than e-Genius, hence the distribution of prizes).
via Popular Science
While we might still be far from commercial all electric passenger jets the fact that they got this far in just two years speaks to the possibilities for the near future.
