3 March 2020
The final fly-off for Boeing’s international GoFly Prize had to be called off because of windy conditions but one team did come away with an award: the Japanese team teTra Aviation has won the $100,000 Pratt & Whitney Disruptor Award.
The Tokyo-based team was awarded the prize, the world’s first global competition to create personal human flyers. The team, captained by Tasuku Nakai, a doctoral student at the University of Tokyo, won the award for its teTra 3 machine.
The aim of the GoFly Prize was to act as a catalyst the creation of personal flyers as the first step towards transforming the future of transportation.
The moment we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived! @prattandwhitney and #GoFlyPrize Founder Gwen Lighter took the stage to announce @Tetra_Aviation as the winner of the Disruptor Award and $100K prize. Congrats to all teams who entered! pic.twitter.com/GkDrdoBw6o
— GoFly (@GoFlyPrize) February 29, 2020
The competition welcomed personal flyers from flying cars, flying motorcycles, hoverboards, jetpacks, human-carrying drones to other personal flyers.
Some 854 teams comprising 3800-plus innovators from 103 countries took up the GoFly challenge and, over the past two years have been creating and testing their machines as manned, mannequin-bearing, and unmanned flyers.
GoFly Founder and CEO Gwen Lighter said, “After much anticipation, we are thrilled to announce that teTra Aviation is the winner of the Pratt & Whitney Disruptor Award.
“The team displayed the technical design and creative prowess that we set out to inspire when we created the GoFly Prize. teTra created a unique personal flyer and we look forward to supporting them as they take the next steps towards revolutionising human mobility.”
The Japanese teTra 3 team – winners! Top: the teTra 3
The Final Fly-Off was held at Moffett Federal Airfield on 29 February. Prior to the final, ten teams were named Phase I winners and were awarded $20,000 prizes for their concepts, while five teams were named Phase II winners and were awarded $50,000 each.
Boeing has not yet nameda new date for the fly-off so $1.5m is still to be won – $1m for the ultimate winner, and two $250k runners up prizes.
