With a forceful buzz, Pete Bitar’s home-made personal aircraft takes to the skies above Silicon Valley, his aluminium pilot chair glinting in the morning sunlight above four spinning propellers.
Dubbed the VertiCycle, it wobbles to a height of about three metres before tipping sideways and plunging back to the runway with a loud crash.
Fortunately, Bitar is piloting the vehicle remotely today from a wireless controller nearby. The craft’s battery packs were damaged in another crash the week before, and replacements couldn’t generate enough thrust to lift him and the vehicle together.
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In fact, none of the 24 teams assembled for the finals of , a contest offering a $1 million grand prize for the best electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) system capable of flying a person for six miles and 20 minutes, so much as lifted someone off the ground.
Some teams brought only half-scale models to NASA’s Moffett Federal Airfield in California, while others reported last-minute technical hitches. Brisk winds also prevented flights on the competition’s second day.
DragonAir, an oversized drone that is piloted standing up, had been expected to make an attempt for the grand prize, but the team behind it shelved its plans after its pilot was mildly injured in a minor crash the day before the contest.
In the end, only four vehicles actually took to the air. “If it was easy, you wouldn’t need millions of dollars in prizes,” said Gwen Lighter, CEO of the GoFly prize. “But once the technology can be safely deployed, it will open up a number of different use cases all around the world.”
She envisages personal flying craft that will enable the existence of aerial commuters, high-speed paramedics and even fictional sports, such as Quidditch from the Harry Potter novels.
The GoFly competition had attracted 854 starry-eyed teams from 103 countries, as well as major sponsors like Boeing and aerospace firm Pratt & Whitney. The two dozen finalists at Moffett Field presented a dazzling variety of designs, from Team Zeva’s carbon fibre flying saucer to , an autonomous flying phone box developed by Colin Hilton, a retired airline pilot from Liverpool, UK.
“The vision is, instead of getting in and dialling a number, you dial a postcode and are seamlessly transported across the city,” says Hilton. Built using Chinese parts bought over the internet, Hilton says his drone can fly his 8-year-old son around the garden.
While no children – or anyone at all – took flight this past weekend, the competition did award a $100,000 “disruptor” prize to , a Japanese team whose sleek, remotely controlled, flying motorcycle reached an altitude of about a metre without crashing.
Even if the top prize had been claimed, $1 million would represent just a tiny fraction of the money that corporate investors have spent on eVTOL aircraft in recent years. Google co-founder Larry Page has funded at least cars, Uber is working on an air taxi service called and start-up raised $590 million from the likes of Toyota in January.
Pete Bitar, who has sunk around $250,000 into his VertiCycle, says this funding disparity is part of what keeps flying cars in the realm of science fiction: “It squelches innovation for little guys trying to build something, from scratch, that’s simpler and better in some ways.”
One of the VertiCycle’s propellers hit its airframe during the short flight and will need repairing before it can fly again, with or without Bitar in the pilot’s seat.
“The first time you do a contest like this, you have a lot of failures,” says Troy Prince, an intellectual property lawyer at Pratt & Whitney. “The next time you do it, people move a lot closer. And the third time, you suddenly have half a dozen teams making it.”
GoFly says it looks forward to awarding the $1 million grand prize in the near future.
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