You May Already be a Winner

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the non-profit Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency (CAFÉ) Foundation have announced a new competition to advance five general aviation technologies: noise reduction, fuel efficiency, speed, safety and ease of use. Registration for the competition officially opened on December 23, 2007. It will be conducted at CAFE's Flight Test Center in Santa Rosa, California from August 2-10, 2008 with a total of $300,000 in prize money.The 2008 competition, called the General Aviation Technology Challenge, also includes an aviation safety category. Making personal aircraft safer and easier to fly is a primary goal of the new GAT Challenge. This $50,000 safety prize will recognize achievement in implementing electronic pilot assistance (eCFI) along with rewarding outstanding handling qualities. Test pilots will evaluate each team's aircraft with the "company pilot" aboard and present their findings to a jury. Jurors will be selected mainly from among aviation, science and automotive press, along with CAFE and NASA officials. Jurors will be given the opportunity to have a familiarization flight in each aircraft with either the test pilot or company pilot. The eCFI tasks to be evaluated are prioritized toward the most common causes of GA fatalities—loss of control and stalling. Among the handling qualities to be evaluated will be spiral stability, maneuvering stability, static longitudinal stability, slow flight, control harmony, roll rate, etc. A stick force gauge will be used to quantify the aircraft's performance in some of these areas. Teams are encouraged to recruit expertise in the area of autopilot servo design, sensor technology, avionics and flight dynamics in order to excel in this contest. All electronic pilot assistance must be securely overridable by the pilot.