Australia’s Dick Smith issues electric airplane challenge

Air races during the Golden Age of aviation in the 1920s and 1930s led to amazing improvements in engines and airframes, as one record after another was shattered. Charles A. Lindbergh claimed the Orteig Prize in 1927, nearly a decade after the $25,000 challenge to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean was announced. The Orteig Prize inspired the Ansari X Prize, meant to encourage the commercialization of space. Burt Rutan and the SpaceShipOne team claimed the $10 million prize in 2004 when the spaceship made two roundtrips to the edge of space in two weeks.

 

Now, the evolution of electric propulsion is driving new twenty-first century competitions.

The Pulitzer Electric Aircraft Race scheduled for October in Springfield, Ohio, is itself a direct descendent of the famed Pulitzer Trophy races of the 1920s.

The most recent competition to advance electric propulsion comes from Down Under, where Australian entrepreneur, adventurer, and aviation advocate Dick Smith is offering a unique trophy to any person who flies an electric aircraft from the United Kingdom to Darwin, Australia, a path flown by a modified Vickers Vimy bomber in 1919, winning a cash prize of 10,000 pounds from the Australian government.

Smith knows what it takes to complete aviation challenges. He was the first person to fly solo around the world in a helicopter, including a refueling stop on a ship. He also flew a helicopter to the North Pole and has flown around the world via the poles in a de Havilland Twin Otter. He also flew a balloon across Australia and against the wind from New Zealand to Australia.

“As more electric aircraft are now being built, I decided to issue this challenge because there will come a time when someone will be able to fly from England to Australia,” Smith told a reporter for Australian Flying magazine. “There will be minimum rules; simply fly an electrically powered aircraft from England to Darwin in the spirit of the 1919 Vickers Vimy flight. The first one to do it gets the beautiful trophy, which is an original sculpture by Linda Klarfeld worth $22,000.” The value of the trophy is about $14,000 in U.S. dollars.

Klarfeld is a well-known Australian sculptor. Dubbed Lightning Woman, the clay and chrome-finished sculpture depicts a woman reaching for the sky next to a lightning bolt. Smith first commissioned the sculpture in 2019. He and Klarfeld collaborated on the design over several years, which, once finalized, took the sculptor a year to complete.

For more information on the challenge, contact Smith at [email protected].