teTra Aviation, a team from Japan that develops a single-seater flying car (air mobility), has won the $100,000 Pratt & Whitney Disruptor Award in the Inaugural GoFly Prize Final Fly-Off, the world’s first global competition to create personal human flyers. The team won the award for its teTra 3 machine. The final examination was conducted at the Moffett Airfield at the NASA Ames Research Center in the Bay Area, USA.
The aircraft was recently approved by the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) for a test flight of its eVTOL (electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing). According to teTra, it is the first eVTOL by a Japanese company to receive FAA approval.
teTra 3’s designers describe the craft efficient and stylish enough to meet all commercial requirements. Tasuku Nakai, the design team’s captain, is a doctoral student in the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Tokyo. He’s studying the strength of materials, fracture mechanics, human-injury assessment, and structural design.
This strange-looking device has a motorcycle-style seating arrangement placed on a folded-up quadcopter airframe. The device lets you in the sky, faster, safer, easier, and quieter than anything does.
Through the development of this aircraft, the company will realize a society where people can move safely and freely in the air, not only improve convenience but also contribute to the creation of a new town where people, technology, and industry can actively interact.
The GoFly Prize has catalyzed the creation of personal flyers as a first step towards transforming the future of transportation with flying cars, flying motorcycles, hoverboards, jetpacks, human-carrying drones, and 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 crafting their machines and testing them as manned, mannequin-bearing, and unmanned machines.
“After much anticipation, we are thrilled to announce that teTra Aviation is the winner of the Pratt & Whitney Disruptor Award,” said GoFly Founder and CEO Gwen Lighter. “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 revolutionizing human mobility.”
