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EAA Founders Innovation Prize

Flash

Well Known Member
One of our own won the EAA Founders Innovation Prize this evening at Oshkosh! Mike "Vac" Vaccaro(RV4) and his team at Flyonspeed.org won for their work on a system for AOA direct information to a pilot(I am paraphrasing poorly). All of the participants did an excellent job and are making significant contributions to the aviation community to increase pilot awareness and safety! Hats off to you Vac!
 
Hopefully the video of the “Shark Tank” format presentation will be streamed soon. All 5 competitors have done a great job and you can see are committed to coming up with viable solutions to reduce the number of loss,of control accidents. The selection panel, including Van, did a very good job and showed demonstrated insight into the problem area as well. It will be a good watch.

- larosta
 
While my contribution to this team have been very limited, this is a great group of very intelligent and collaborative individuals. The sum of the brain trust of the entire team is unreal. Glad to be associated with such fine people.

Great job guys! Sure wish I could have been there!
 
As another small-scale contributor, i'm also pleased to see this recognition for the team. A lot of smart people have worked hard to bring us an amazing product that should contribute to the increased safety of any aircraft so equipped.
 
Ditto what Snowflake said
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The Trophy is a beauty
 
Congratulations! I really enjoy following your progress on this development and look forward to getting into my RV-8 at some point.
 
Team members

I would happily post all the team member names if I knew them but unfortunately I don't. So if there is someone out there that does, would you mind posting so they can get their due credit. Thanks
 
The FlyONSPEED Team

The neat thing about our project is that it’s organic. Everyone is a volunteer and contributes as they have time available. I’ve always been amazed at the amount of talent in our community. In no particular order, these are the folks that make up our team:

Lenny Iszak (RV-10)
Christopher Jones (RV-6A)
Cecil Jones (RV-8)
Phil Starbuck
Vern Little (Rocket)
Brian Chesteen (RV-7)
Bob Baggerman
Kacy Anderson (RV-7)
Paul Mantegna (RV-7)
Lt Daniel Rollings (RV-4)
Rob Prior (RV-6)
Nigel Speedy (RV-8)

I’m fortunate to live near Eglin AFB, where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone who has worked in flight test or system development. This list doesn’t include all of the folks who have wandered into the hangar over the past five years and have helped out. Nor does it include our academic advisor, Dr. Dave Rogers, USNA, or all of the countless talented folks I’ve been able to network with that have contributed as well. It demonstrates what we can do when the VAF family collaborates. Special thanks to Ed Wischmeyer for some hardy debate and helping develop some of our flight test protocol.

I’d also like to thank our hard core initial beta testers: Rob Schroer, Sid Mayeux, and Jeff Vaughn. And when we developed Gen 2, we couldn’t have done the “home built” version without the help of Gary Sobek and Carlos Rodriguez.

The bad news is that I’m sure I’m forgetting somebody, and if that’s the case I apologize and I will edit this as soon as either the synapse fires or someone tells me what I’m thinking :)

And for all of the folks that take the time to participate in the safety discussion—thank you too. That discourse shapes the evolution of the project. Hopefully we are demonstrating what AOA-based energy cues bring to the fight. We’ll be keeping our open-source, non-profit, volunteer model as we move forward, and will post here and on our website as we learn more.

Vac
Chief Stick Monkey and Assistant Morale Officer
FlyONSPEED.org
 
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Vac, Data, Chris, and Co,
Well done, Y’all. I think the best part about this award, the thing that underscores the strength and value of the concept, is that this is the second Founders Innovation Prize for Flyonspeed. Like you said, Vac, hopefully the producers will take it and roll it out to the flying public. Piping AOA info to the pilot to help manage energy for optimum maneuvering takes this AOA system way beyond a mere stall warning system. I’m proud of y’all, and thrilled to have played my small part.
 
One More!

I just updated the list of folks that have been helping out. As I feared, I left some one out. Fixed :)

As I said, we are truly blessed to have all this talent in our community. And I also forgot to thank Doug—none of this would work without the VAF back bone!

Vac
 
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