While living in Oregon back in 2009, a coworker told me about the CAFE Green Flight Challenge. This competition pushed the limits of efficiency, requiring participants to fly 200 miles in under 2 hours while consuming less than the equivalent power contained in 1 gallon of gasoline. This sounded exciting!
We were both working full time, but we decided to make a team and attempted to enter the competition anyway. I discovered about the competition within a few months of the deadline to enter, and we simply weren’t able to get all of our components or funding in time to qualify–but we tried anyway!
My original design was to use a Stemme S10 motor glider frame with a 75 foot wingspan and gut it. I found an advanced ultra-efficient electric motor by a company in Southern California, and they were interested in selling me a custom motor. I toyed with the idea of using a PEM device and a compressed hydrogen tank, but due to the inefficiencies and risks associated with compressed hydrogen, I quickly decided to use an electric battery pack made from a stack of A123’s 20-ah flat panel batteries (lithium nanophosphate).
I contacted Stemme, the airframe manufacturer, but I would not have been able to receive a new glider (shipped from Germany) in time for the competition. I quickly found a used glider for sale in Arizona at $250,000, which would have saved us a significant amount of money. While the motor was not in production yet and only a small prototype had been built, the company committed to building us a motor. e had to get funding ASAP. Unfortunately, all of the companies that I contacted were already supporting existing teams, and we quickly ran out of time while looking for others.
Coincidentally, the EcoEagle was one of the finalists in the competition, and they used the exact same airframe.
Timing is everything!