![GoAERO CEO Gwen Lighter (right) poses with Bob Buddecke, president of electronic solutions at Honeywell—one of the competition’s many sponsors. [Courtesy: GoAERO]](https://flyingmag1.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/FLY1125_1.3-Modern-Flying-1.jpeg?width=959&height=673)
More than 1,600 university students, engineers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other participants are vying to design and build a new generation of emergency response aircraft. And the competition is heating up.
September marked the submission deadline for Stage 2 of GoAERO (Aerial Emergency Response Operations): a three-year challenge that has tasked nearly 200 teams with creating automated aircraft for disaster relief, aerial firefighting, casualty evacuation, and any number of emergency scenarios. Up for grabs is $2 million in prize money—and the opportunity to save countless lives.
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“The need for innovation in emergency response systems has never been more urgent,” Gwen Lighter, founder and CEO of GoAERO, told FLYING. “Existing systems are often outdated and overwhelmed, unable to meet the scale and complexity of today’s crises…We must develop and deploy new technologies to save lives and deliver aid faster and more effectively in this new era of disaster.”
An estimated 4.5 million Americans live in so-called “ambulance deserts”—locations where residents may need to wait longer than 25 minutes for emergency services to arrive. Even in cities with robust medical facilities, traffic can impede first responders. Aircraft can avoid congestion on the ground. Increasingly, though, they must contend with extreme weather conditions in the air.
In some cases, helicopters and drones can stand in for ambulances. But each comes with limitations. Rotorcraft are often expensive to procure and fare poorly in tight areas. Drones address these shortcomings, but they are too small and light to carry people.
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According to Lighter, those trade-offs are not a given. She said GoAERO teams are building aircraft that combine the advantages of both helicopters and drones in order to deliver first responders, patients, and supplies in cities, rural areas, and disaster zones.
“Shrinking federal budgets around the globe are constraining the public sector’s ability to drive innovation in emergency response, limiting critical work at disaster relief agencies and stalling advancements at aerospace and aviation organizations that depend on government support,” Lighter said. “As a result, the pressure is mounting on the private sector to lead the way.”
Go Big or GoAERO
GoAERO launched in February 2024 and remains open to students, businesses, individuals, and other competitors—even those that missed out on its first two stages.
As of July, 198 teams from 85 countries were signed on to the competition, including about 60 teams from U.S. and international universities and “scores” of private companies, Lighter said. Organizers provide some design guidance. But the goal is to produce a wide variety of remotely piloted or fully self-flying aircraft for “rescue and response missions after natural disasters, medical emergencies, and other humanitarian crises.”
Teams receive help in the form of video lectures, webinars, software integrations, and a collection of the “world’s leading experts in aviation, emergency response, and business…including specialists in aircraft design, systems engineering, fabrication and testing, and funding,” Lighter said. Boeing is GoAERO’s chief sponsor. Others include RTX, Honeywell, Iridium, and Reliable Robotics.
Teams work with mentors from aerospace technology disruptors, including Anduril, Sikorsky, Electra, Pivotal, and electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) air taxi developers Joby Aviation, Archer Aviation, and Wisk Aero. Other experts come from universities, industry groups such as the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and even federal agencies such as NASA and the U.S. Army.
GoAERO in February announced eleven $10,000 Stage 1 winners, as well as 14 U.S.-based university teams that secured NASA-backed innovation awards. Among the winners popular use cases include medical evacuation and disaster response.
Students at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and von Karman Institute of Fluid Dynamics in Belgium, for example, formed Team Elevate based on their personal experiences with ambulance deserts and slow response times. Elevate was one of three teams invited to showcase their digital-only submissions in Shark Tank-style presentations at this summer’s Paris Air Show.
Delft aerodynamics students Valter Somlai and Maan Pandya colead the team of nearly 20 students. Somlai in 2023 witnessed an ambulance struggle to reach an emergency in rural Hungary, where tree cover prevented a helicopter landing. Pandya, who lived in India, similarly saw first responders contend with congested urban streets.
The students are working with a local fire department to refine their eVTOL concept, which is designed to fly autonomously with remote human oversight and fold to fit within the back of a truck.
“What the fire personnel described as the most essential components and capabilities for a prospective emergency response flyer is exactly what Team Elevate is working on,” Lighter said.
Like Somlai and Pandya, about 40 engineering students comprising the Technical University of Munich’s Team HORYZN were spurred to action by flooding in Germany, earthquakes in Turkey, and wildfires in California. The team previously built and flew an eVTOL demonstrator that delivered defibrillators faster than an ambulance. Now, it is shifting focus to emergency response.
HORYZN’s design is an eVTOL with distributed electric propulsion, designed for takeoff and landing in tough conditions. The concept calls for quick deployment, tight maneuvering, and high performance with a heavy payload. Ultimately, the team’s goal is to carry humans.
Another Stage 1 winner, Cranfield University’s Team CraneAERO, was inspired by team leader Vishal Youhanna work developing a concept for an aircraft that could fly in Mars’ thin atmosphere, like NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter. Similarly, the team is building an emergency flyer designed to operate in wildfires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters.
The remotely piloted quadrotor eVTOL is designed to evacuate people or quickly deliver food, water, and medicine. It is equipped with full situational awareness, precision navigation, and obstacle avoidance.
The Stage 2 build phase saw the teams overcome a litany of technical and operational challenges, from integrating lidar and artificial intelligence to balancing the demands of endurance and maneuverability. Prize money and other resources helped them conduct simulations and prototyping to prove out their concepts, as well as invest in hardware, sensors, and ground control systems.
Eight Stage 2 winners to be announced in November will receive $40,000 each. With the submission deadline closed, teams are now looking ahead to the final stage—a three-day fly-off planned for 2027.
After completing a trio of missions—such as popping a balloon on the surface of a shallow pool—the grand prize winner will receive $1 million, and teams will have the opportunity to partner up with sponsors. The qualifying period for the fly-off opens in June.
Glimpse of the Future
According to Lighter, neither helicopters nor drones are optimal for emergency response missions. But that hasn’t stopped the industry from automating them.
Beyond competitions like GoAERO and XPrize Wildfire—a four-year contest with an $11 million prize purse—public safety agencies are already exploring autonomous rotorcraft and multicopters.
Lockheed Martin subsidiary Sikorsky, for instance, is pairing its optionally piloted Black Hawk with startup Rain’s Wildfire Mission Autonomy System to battle blazes—a capability the partners have already demonstrated. In September, Sikorsky signed a five-year agreement with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) to explore adding an autonomous S-70i Firehawk to its arsenal. Cal Fire boasts the world’s largest civil aerial firefighting fleet and owns a burgeoning fleet of drones.
![GoAERO CEO Gwen Lighter (right) with Jiekun Wu of GoAERO’s Purdue
University team. [Courtesy: GoAERO]](https://flyingmag1.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/FLY1125_1.3-Modern-Flying-2.jpeg?width=633&height=478)
In July, FLYING exclusively reported a similar partnership between Cal Fire and autonomy provider Skyryse. Warren Curry, Skyryse’s vice president of sales, said the company recently attended a Cal Fire training event to get feedback on SkyOS—its platform-agnostic system that enables optional piloting. Unlike Lighter, Curry believes existing aircraft are capable.
He says the challenge is on the pilot side.
“I think the form factors, the platforms themselves, I personally don’t think are the issue,” Curry said. “I think what we’re experiencing is the environments and situations these pilots who fly these aircraft are finding themselves in is just getting more and more complicated.”
Another company, SiFly, told FLYING in August that the San Bernardino County Fire Department in California plans to deploy its Q12 and Q250 drones to scout and douse fires. Fire departments in major cities such as New York and Los Angeles also use drones, while hundreds of law enforcement agencies have adopted Drone as First Responder (DFR) programs.
“In public safety missions, and firefighting operations specifically, the mission is all about gaining access to data quickly, creating situational awareness, and being able to act on that data with systems that unlock greater range, speed, payload capacity, and safety,” said SiFly chief strategy officer David Mazar. “Until now, much of that capability was locked up in high value, complex assets in the form of helicopters.”
These early deployments could be a sign of things to come. The FAA uses performance-based regulations to authorize autonomous aircraft to drop water or fire retardant. But recent regulatory developments could open the floodgates.
July’s Modernization of Special Airworthiness Certification (MOSAIC) rule, for example, permits simplified flight controls on light-sport category aircraft. That gives systems like SkyOS—which automates nearly all conventional controls—a simpler path to integration.
“MOSAIC was significant for us,” Curry said. “You look at SkyOS, and you could almost replace that with simplified vehicle operations in a lot of ways, if not every way.”
The FAA’s proposed Part 108 rule, meanwhile, would expand the envelope for autonomous drones by standardizing beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations. It would eliminate the existing waiver system—which awards temporary BVLOS privileges—and permit drone operators to replace human observers with onboard detect and avoid systems. The FAA and NASA are helping private firms develop specialized traffic management systems to monitor these flights, which under the proposal would even be permitted in controlled airspace.
“The time it takes to build a clean slate aircraft and get it certified, I don’t think we have that time right now,” said Curry. “I think we need to provide solutions now to help [first responders] protect our communities and keep themselves safe.”
This column first appeared in the November Issue 964 of the FLYING print edition.
