(January 2012) The news cycle is like a carousel whose riders are ever changing. For a brief moment in September, the Green Flight Challenge swept past: NASA handed a prize of $1.35 million to an airplane that had achieved an efficiency of 400 passenger-miles per gallon. Huh? said the world — and then along came Jen and Angie.
The contest that had produced this surprising but ephemeral result was set in motion by the CAFE (Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency) Foundation, which for the past three decades has encouraged innovation and refinement in general aviation with a series of programs and competitions. It started with the CAFE races, efficiency contests that took place in northern California from 1981 to 1990. Based on an evolving formula combining speed, fuel consumption and payload, they had quite an impact: Several airplanes, including Burt Rutan‘s Catbird, were specially designed as CAFE racers. But toward the end it seemed as though the universe of hyperefficient CAFE winners had shrunk to the VariEzes of two monomaniacal modifiers, Gary Hertzler and Klaus Savier.
