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Epic’s E1000 Wins Flying’s 2020 Innovation Award

The new turboprop combines power with passion to earn our highest honor.

The editors at Flying announced today that Epic Aircraft’s E1000 has won the 2020 Flying Innovation Award. The new turboprop combines power with passion to earn our highest honor, amongst a strong field of 2020 Editors’ Choice Award winners. “We’re really pleased to be in a position to award the 2020 Innovation Award to Epic Aircraft for the phenomenal job that you’ve done, not just bringing the aircraft to certification over a couple of decades, but also in the midst of everything that we’ve been going through over the last 4 months now, to continue pushing forward, to get those first deliveries out the door, and into the hands of some extremely happy pilots,” said Flying’s Editor-in-Chief Julie Boatman.

We shared the news with the team at Epic Aircraft in a Zoom call on Wednesday, July 1. Epic CEO and President Doug King enjoyed the news, as a validation of the incredible efforts involved in bringing the E1000 to life from its genesis in the Epic LT. “Flying magazine is the premier publication for our customers and having read Flying magazine since I was riding around in my dad’s lap in his 172—that’s pretty cool!”

“I just gave a demo flight to a guy,” added King, “and it’s always fun when a potential customer comes out of the airplane, because they always have the same kind of reaction—holy cow! Or something not repeatable.” This resonates with the reason why the E1000 was chosen as this year’s award winner: “The feedback from the first owners who have flown it have completely validated the assessments that we’ve made over the years,” said Boatman.

Flying launched the Innovation Award in 2016 as an extension of the Editors’ Choice Awards to celebrate the overarching achievement demonstrated by one of the five ECA winners previously announced. That first winner, the HondaJet, exemplified the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that compelled us to set it above the rest. The Epic E1000 deserves similar acknowledgment—based on the relentless quest for quality and performance that meant a long development cycle, leading to a superb product that has rolled off the production line in Bend, and a few remarkably innovative features. The physical award presentation would normally take place at EAA AirVenture, but instead will be presented to the Epic team at an event this fall.

Look for our feature on the E1000 in the August 2020 issue of Flying.

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