Who Birthed the Electric Plane?

A New X-Prize?

Seeley believes that a cash prize can drive development of clean aircraft just as it did for spacecraft and may soon do for super-efficient automobiles. The challenge is to get a trifecta: 100 miles, at 100 miles per hour and the energy equivalent of 100 miles per gallon of gasoline, in a plane that is not only efficient but also comfortable and easy to operate.

The search is now on for a funder. At the meeting, Seeley and other speakers mentioned Google as a possibility. More than wishful thinking, it was a not-so-subtle hint to the mega-corporation’s co-founder, Larry Page, who sat a few feet from the speaker’s podium. While Page hasn’t pledged any money yet, his interest is strong. “He’s been at every event we’ve had,” said Anne Seeley. (Google has already funded a $30-million Lunar X-Prize for the first team to send a robotic spacecraft to the moon.)

Page: From left, Mark Moore of NASA, Larry Page of Google, Brien Seeley of CAFE.  Sean Captain

The CAFE foundation will host a mini-version of the Green Prize in August, awarding $50,000 to the most efficient aircraft. It’s one of five NASA-funded prizes, totaling $300,000, that will be awarded as part of CAFE’s General Aviation Technology Challenge.

A New Kind of Plane

Electric power can improve the efficiency of not just an airplane’s power system but its entire design. “There’s all sorts of degrees of freedom in electric propulsion that we haven’t exercised yet,” NASA’s Moore told the meeting. “These aircraft should not look the same. They should be very different.” Unlike gas engines, which become less efficient when scaled down, electric motors are efficient regardless of size. So Moore proposes “distributed propulsion”— replacing the one- or two-engine “hotdog with wings” plane design with new craft sporting four, six, or eight motors.