Meet The 10 Winners of GoFly Phase I

[DooKey]

Boeing has sponsored a GoFly Challenge that will pay $20K to 10 designers of personal flying aircraft. The winners of the prizes are pretty innovative and if you hit the GoFly website you can check all of them out. The best part about this is Phase 2 is all about building these designs. One of them might be in your garage sometime in the future.

Over the course of several weeks, our panel of 97 industry experts with over a millennium of combined industry experience carefully evaluated each individual aspect of every submission in accordance with the official Technical Guidelines. The pool of judges included numerous Chief Engineers, Flight Test Engineers, Senior Technical Fellows, Pilots, and Esteemed Academics from a collection of the world’s most innovative and prestigious aerospace companies and academia.

 

[TangledThornz]

Most of the designs look like blenders with wings. I hope there is major safety in place because I can see someone lose a limb or two or even worse if they slip while the rotors are running.

 

[cbutters]

Most of the designs look like blenders with wings. I hope there is major safety in place because I can see someone lose a limb or two or even worse if they slip while the rotors are running.

I agree with you.

I hate to be a skeptic, but a lot of these designs are just bad...
50% look like they won't actually be able to fly; or wont have the stability to make the VTOL transition from lifting off the ground to forward motion.
75% look incredibly dangerous to the rider or at the very least any bystanders.
25% look like they have potential though.

 

[IcePickFreak]

Future SUV designers right there.

 

[Rahh]

I agree with you.

I hate to be a skeptic, but a lot of these designs are just bad...
50% look like they won't actually be able to fly; or wont have the stability to make the VTOL transition from lifting off the ground to forward motion.
75% look incredibly dangerous to the rider or at the very least any bystanders.
25% look like they have potential though.

25% = Flykart 2 and Tetra 3? Though the Flykart 2 looks awfully like a hospital chair which is one step closer to getting you there I guess.

 

[Izord]

I agree with you.

I hate to be a skeptic, but a lot of these designs are just bad...
50% look like they won't actually be able to fly; or wont have the stability to make the VTOL transition from lifting off the ground to forward motion.
75% look incredibly dangerous to the rider or at the very least any bystanders.
25% look like they have potential though.

Ya, multirotor racing has been a multimillion dollar sport for a number of years and it's already been hammered out what works to win and what doesn't. Tri-rotors basically suck because they need moving parts for the tailrotor that can break or go out of alignment. X-4 Quadrotors with planar aligned blades universally win and have four moving parts. The idea of making a quadrotor layout with offset angled fixed blade alignment is dumb, I don't want to think too much about using 16 rotors for a X-16/4 quadrotor configuration like the first design does. Fairly sure it's not as efficient from the prop/airflow standpoint, but the redundancy may be desired along with smaller cheaper motors. Never seen in racing or camera work though. The better design for redundancy is an X-8 config with coaxial counter-rotating blades. All the designs look dumb to me. Seriously Boeing you're drunk, go home. If you were serious you'd ask Shaun Taylor or the other world-class winners how to make a multirotor. Definitely put several spoilers and apehangers and use potato quality rendering. /sarcasm