Saturday, August 18, 2007

Personal Air Vehicle Challenge Results

Space for All has a good collection of links on the PAV Challenge that completed a few days ago. You can check there for the main articles; here are a few more to supplement those:

Pipistrel Virus the Big Winner at PAV Challenge - EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association) News

Pipistrel Big Winner at NASA Challenge - from Pipistrel

ZDNet Photo Gallery of PAV Challenge - each photo comes with a paragraph or 2 showing what's going on, so you get a good sense of what happened

Far from 'The Jetsons', air cars for commuters - from ZDNet, gives an overview of the challenge. As sometimes happens with first-year events like this, it sounds like there weren't a lot of attendees at this one, according to the article. I wouldn't expect a lot of spectators at the actual challenge since it ran from Aug 4-12. Hopefully at least the post-challenge display event was better attended, and by next year the word will be out and the CAFE Foundation will hone their promotional skills.

Videos:

Anders' Personal Air Vehicle, CAFE Foundation, RV-4

Vance Tuner's Personal Air Vehicle, PAV Challenge, CAFE Foundation

Rodger Musso's Personal Air Vehicle, PAV Challenge, CAFE Foundation

Video Update (August 27):

John Rehn's Personal Air Vehicle Challenge, CAFE Foundation

Here are some older, but fun, videos I ran across on the same site:

Flying Car 350Z - Westin's Personal Air Vehicle - a lighthearted, fictional account of Westin, who finds out about the cool PAV Challenge and decides to start with what is presumably his Dad's car as a starting point. According to the text this was a test video for a CAFE fundraiser.

RC Demo for the CAFE Foundation - a radio-controlled mini-PAV demo

Update (August 19): CAFE has posted a slide show of photos from the event, including lots of small planes and a large check. They've also posted a summary of the event and a breakdown of the scores in the various parts of the competition in a 2007 NASA PAV Challenge Results page.