• 25 Mar 2025 05:48 PM
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VerdeGo Aero: The Founders

This is a sidebar to the article, "Here Come The Hybrids! - VerdeGo Aero Offers Three Hybrid-Electric Products"

Erik Lindbergh, the grandson of the famed trans-Atlantic aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh, helped launch the XPRIZE Foundation in 1996, which offered a cash award for the first team that could build and launch a rocket into space, and do it again in two weeks. Then, in May 2002, he commemorated the 75th anniversary of his grandfather’s epic, non-stop flight by flying solo from New York to Paris in a Lancair Columbia 300 in 17 hours and 7 minutes.

The media coverage “re-energized the XPRIZE,” and two years later the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE was awarded to SpaceShipOne. Sir Richard Branson bought the rights to develop SpaceShipOne for Virgin Galactic, Elon Musk joined the XPRIZE board of trustees and Google’s Larry Page challenged the XPRIZE board “to think beyond spaceflight and use prize philanthropy to help solve the world’s greatest challenges,” Lindbergh wrote in a blog.

Then, in 2008, Lindbergh saw his first electric aircraft and “recognizing the potential, developed the Lindbergh Electric Aircraft Prize (LEAP) to incentivize companies that were building hardware and demonstrating excellence in the industry.” The prizes were awarded alternatively at venues in the US and Europe, including EAA AirVenture in Wisconsin, AERO Friedrichshafen in Germany and the NASA Green Flight Challenge in California.

Some of the early LEAP award winners included Shanghai-based Yuneec for the two-seat E430 aircraft that first flew in 2009; Sonex E-Flight Initiative electric propulsion system; Axel Lange for the development of the Antares 20E motor glider, the world’s first certified production electric aircraft; LZ Design for its propulsion system; Solar Impulse for its around-the-world flight; and participants in the NASA Green Flight Challenge, including Pipistrel’s Taurus G4, PC-Aero’s Elektra One, and the University of Stuttgart’s eGenius.

Some of Lindbergh’s other initiatives included the International Workshop for Electric Aircraft Standardization at the 2012 Sun ‘N Fun in Florida, which included the second Electric Aircraft Development Alliance meeting. Lindbergh was also the keynote speaker at the 2015 VFS Technical Meeting on Environmental Sustainability in Design and Operations of Aircraft in Montreal, Canada.

In 2013, the Lindbergh Foundation formally joined with the XPRIZE Foundation to create the Forever Flight Alliance aimed at mapping and accelerating the pathways to net zero-carbon aviation. This included the pursuit of zero-carbon fuels and advanced energy storage.

Dr. Richard “Pat” Anderson is a tenured professor of aerospace engineering at ERAU and recently stepped down as the director of the Eagle Flight Research Center (EFRC), established in 1998 at the ERAU campus in Daytona Beach. The 185-acre (75-hA) campus hosts 7,200 undergraduate and 800 graduate students, as well as a state-of-the-art flight school. About 100 aircraft make around 400 takeoffs and landings a day. EFRC specializes in new vehicle concepts, advanced flight controls and novel certification strategies.

Much of Anderson’s work over the past 15 years has focused on electric propulsion, which began as an extension of the EFRC’s early research into unleaded and alternate fuels for general aviation aircraft (see “Leadership Profile: Prof. Richard ‘Pat’ Anderson,” Vertiflite, Jan/Feb 2021).

ERAU’s research into reduced fuel consumption happened to align with NASA’s Green Flight Challenge, and the Ray Foundation, Inc. — founded in 1963 by James C. and Joan L. Ray to support youth education through aviation — stepped forward to help the university buy a German-built Stemme S10 motor glider and retrofit it with a hybrid-electric propulsion system.

The EcoEagle utilized a BRP Rotax hybrid-electric system originally developed for Flight Design, a German general aviation manufacturer. It used a gas-powered, 100-hp (75- kW) Rotax 912 four-cylinder engine for takeoff and climb; then the pilot would switch to a 40-hp (30-kW) battery-powered electric motor for cruise, using a custom-designed clutch.

The EcoEagle flew at the NASA and Google sponsored Green Flight Challenge hosted by the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency (CAFE) Foundation in Santa Rosa, California, in 2011, but placed fourth of the four competitors who made it to the competition. The goal of the competition was for participants to fly 200 miles (320 km) in under two hours while consuming less than a gallon (3.8 l) of gasoline (“mogas”) per occupant. Unfortunately, the flights of the two-seat EcoEagle carried only the pilot because of liability considerations, which reduced its score.

In many respects, the EcoEagle was a success, and Anderson was recognized for his leadership of the student team that developed and flew the first manned hybrid-electric, gasoline-battery aircraft.

Eric Bartsch spent the early part of his engineering career developing products and leading engineering teams in the consumer products industry. Then, in 2008, he became vice president of the product division of Horizon Hobby, where he helped develop and produce literally millions of electric-powered, radio- controlled aircraft, helicopters, cars and boats for the hobbyist market.

In 2013, he became acting general manager of GreenWing International — a spin-off of the China-based Yuneec drone company — which matured and started selling the Yuneec/GreenWing single-seat e-Spyder and the two-seat composite E-430 as experimental amateur-built kits. Bartsch worked closely with Yuneec/GreenWing founder Tian Yu, who is the founder and CEO of Autoflight in China, now a leading eVTOL company. A pair of eSpyders was used in the first-ever formation flight of electric aircraft at AirVenture 2013. Bartsch met Lindbergh when he visited GreenWing/Yuneec at the Cable Airport in Southern California to take his first flight in an electric aircraft.

The fact that Lindbergh, Anderson and Bartsch shared an interest in sustainable aviation made them natural collaborators.

Lindbergh and Anderson first worked together in the late 2000s when the ERFC was testing alternative general aviation fuels. And all three started working together in 2012 when Lindbergh launched the Powering Imagination initiative to make the future of aviation “Clean, Quiet and Exciting,” with a focus on electric flight, alternative fuels and noise reduction.

They established the Quiet Flight Initiative in partnership with Embry-Riddle to create an electric aircraft that could be used for noise reduction trials with the National Park Service to reduce air tour noise over the Grand Canyon and other sensitive areas. Anderson oversaw this student-led initiative, which converted a Diamond Aircraft HK36 motor-glider donated by Lockheed Martin Skunk Works from a gas engine to a 67-hp (50-kW) YASA electric motor. The aircraft, named the “eSpirit of St. Louis,” was ground-run at AirVenture 2017 and first taxied under its own power in 2021.