• 30 Mar 2025 08:35 AM
• 0

GoAERO Awards $500,000 to Stage 1 Teams

By Tom Risen, Managing Editor
Vertiflite, Mar/Apr 2025

The GoAERO Prize global competition to create emergency response flyers announced on Feb. 11 the award of $100,000 to 11 industry and university teams for their Stage 1 prototype designs, as well as $400,000 to 14 teams at US universities with support from NASA. Three teams won support from both.

The GoAERO Prize is a three-year competition for teams to win over $2M in prizes for demonstrators for portable, autonomy-enabled flyers that respond to natural disasters, medical emergencies, climate change and humanitarian crises. The competition currently includes 198 teams from 85 countries, whom GoAERO founder and CEO Gwen Lighter called “some of the brightest minds in the aviation and engineering industries.”

“Every second counts in an emergency,” she said. “There is a growing gap between what current aircraft can do and what first responders need.”

GoAERO (Aerial Emergency Response Operations) was announced last year at the Vertical Flight Society’s Transformative Vertical Flight (TVF) meeting in February 2024. At this year’s TVF 2025 (see “TVF 2025 Highlights AAM Progress and Challenges,” Vertiflite, Mar/Apr 2025), Lighter implored VFS members to get involved in the competition as participants, mentors to the teams, judges or other volunteers.

The GoAERO Prize competition — a follow-on to the GoFly Prize competition several years ago — is supported by Boeing, NASA, RTX, Honeywell and Saft, with in-kind support from Iridium, Global Aerospace and Gardner Aviation Services. More than 30 organizations, including VFS, are organizational partners.

The 11 Stage 1 team winners are (those teams in both groups are marked with an asterisk):

• A2 Cal (Berkeley, California)
• CraneAero (Cranfield, UK)
• Elevate (Delft, Netherlands)
• Harmony* (College Station, Texas, and Stillwater, Oklahoma)
• HORYZN (Munich, Germany)
• LIFT + UT Austin / Texas Aerial Robotics (Austin, Texas)
• MOSTAVIO (Toronto, Canada)
• MOYA AERO (Sao Jose dos Campos, Brazil)
• PSU Swift*, Penn State University (State College, Pennsylvania)
• Tartan Air Rescue* (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
• Trek Aerospace (Folsom, California)

The 14 teams at US universities receiving funds from GoAERO with support from NASA’s University Innovation Project are:

• Aggie First Response, North Carolina A&T State University (Greensboro, North Carolina)
• AirCRAFT Lab, Saint Louis University (St. Louis, Missouri)
• ASCEND, University of Texas, Austin (Austin, Texas)
• Autonomous Support for Disaster Lifesaver (ASDL), Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, Georgia)
• CPP.AERO Pegasus, California Polytechnic University, Pomona (Pomona, California)
• GoAERO Purdue, Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana)
• Harmony*, Texas A&M University & Oklahoma State University (College Station, Texas, and Stillwater, Oklahoma)
• PSU Swift*, Penn State University (State College, Pennsylvania)
• Rescue Pack, North Carolina State University (Raleigh, North Carolina)
• Talon Lift, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (Daytona Beach, Florida)
• Tartan Air Rescue*, Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
• The Sloopy Works, The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio)
• VSDDL, Auburn University (Auburn, Alabama)
• Virginia Tech, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Blacksburg, Virginia)

Teams will now prepare for Stage 2 and present either a fullscale or sub-scale flyer. Up to eight teams will be awarded additional prize money for their prototypes. The GoAERO Fly-Off qualifying period will require an aircraft that has demonstrated controlled flight capability with a full payload. Teams in the fly-off can win an additional $1.65M by completing three separate missions testing capabilities relevant to public good missions (see “GoAERO Launches $2M+ VTOL Challenge,” Vertiflite, March/April 2024).

Teams can compete in Stage 2 of the GoAERO Prize without having participated in Stage 1. Competition rules and additional information can be found at www.goaeroprize.com.