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INAUGURAL
WORLD SKY RACE PRIZE
$1,000,000
As a Catalyst, the World Air League announces the World Sky Race Prize to be awarded to the winning team of the World Sky Race 2023-2024. The World Sky Race Prize is being created to challenge inventors to invent and adventurers to compete. The World Sky Race will showcase sustainable lighter-than-air aviation in an epic green race of airships around the world. The World Sky Race is to encourage new, efficient and effective solutions for adapting to climate change. The practical proof will be provided by the winner.
By May 1, 2022, a minimum of 5 airships teams must be formed following the race registration rules and requirements. The World Sky Race entry fees will increase the World Sky Race Prize to $5,000,000..
General Race Rules:
- All eligible aircraft entries types, the airship must be a lighter-than-air vessel:
- Non-rigid (blimp)
- Semi-rigid (dirigible)
- Fully-rigid (classic zeppelin)
- For duration of the World Sky Race, the airship must have a valid airworthiness certificate issued by a national civil aviation authority. The certification must be acceptable for the airship’s operation in all the countries of the Race routes.
- Airship must have prescribed limits for hull and G&L insurance for the Race routes.
- All pilots must be licensed for day/night, VFR/IFR, and multi-engine airship operations and have current medical certificates for the duration of the Race.
- All pilots should have an airship rating, or at a minimum the lead pilot must have ratings for airship commercial flight instructor.
- Airship teams attempting an ocean crossing must have completed one prescribed marine fueling demonstration exercise prior to the Race.
- All entry fees must be paid in full 180 days prior to the Race.
- A minimum of 5 airship teams are required for the Race.
- All airship teams will be prohibited from sponsorship by groups, affiliations, or organizations that advocate or promote:
- Alcohol
- Tobacco
- Weapons manufacturing
- Religious organizations or agendas
- Political organizations or agendas
- Based on flight time logged over a specified course, each Race segment will have one winner.
- Based on the cumulative least time of all the race segments, the overall World Sky Champion will be crowned the winner.
The World Sky Race Prize will produce several historic aviation records:
- First international airship competition;
- First team to circumnavigate the globe in a lighter-than-air vessel;
- Fastest team to circumnavigate the globe in a lighter-than-air vessel
Future World Sky Race Prizes will be endowed by the World Air League to enable the World Sky Race to be held every three years. With this self-renewing incentive, the World Sky Race Prize will transform lighter-than-air industry by providing incentives to educate, operate, and innovate. Leaders in the aerospace industry will watch, listen, learn, and have incentive to develop new airship systems from the insights gained by the Race contestants.
Technology prizes have an effective track record for creating innovation by:
- Establishing a goal without the necessity to predict which team or approach is most likely to succeed;
- Benefiting from novel technical and operational approaches without bearing high levels of risk;
- Reaching beyond the typical participants to draw in many new minds interested in focusing on new solutions to old problems
- Bringing to light new perspectives that spring from out-of-discipline participants;
- Dramatically increasing the cost-effectiveness of airship development and maximizing research resources
- Paying only for demonstrated success
Many history changing events have been created by prizes. In 1714, the Longitude Prize stimulated the development of the first practical navigational method to determine a ship’s longitude. In 1927, the Orteig Prize inspired Charles Lindbergh to fly from New York to Paris nonstop with the subsequent expansion of interest in air travel among the general public. Today's XPrize has made commercial space developments possible and practical. The World Sky Race Teams will be competing not just for the cash purse, but also for the prestige, publicity, and intrinsic satisfaction of directly solving an important issue of climate change. Prizes create the incentives for investment and thus leverage the impact of the prize purse. With a focus on targeted results-based competition that is open to multiple approaches, prizes empower new, untapped talent to deliver unexpected solutions to tough problems.
The present path of aviation is not sustainable. It disrupts, degrades and ultimately destroys our protective atmosphere. The Inaugural World Sky Race Prize starts with the successful lighter-than-air aviation engineering proofs developed and deployed in the 1920s and 1930s. The physics of lighter-than-air are simple. Buoyancy, not energy, is used for lift and staying the air. By simply floating through the air, the reduced carbon footprint and fuel savings is phenomenal, more than 75% and proven. The Inaugural World Sky Race Prize will modernize and make safer that which was successfully accomplished a century ago. Back to the future, the Inaugural World Sky Race Prize is about creating an alternative path based on technology, economics, efficiency and sustainability.
Above and Beyond the reduced carbon footprint, the Inaugural World Sky Race Prize will set in motion the disruptive greening of the global transportation grid by reducing future needs for roads, railroads, harbors and runways. Globally, this will eliminate the needs not for just the last mile of roads, but rather will eliminate the need for the last 1,000 miles of roads. Every government in the world having to budget for infrastructure will be watching. Airship commerce will enable the third world to leapfrog and integrate into global commerce without destroying their lands and waterways and even their unique culture by reducing the construction of transportation infrastructure.
Inaugural World Sky Race Prize - Path to a Sustainable Future
No roads, No bridges, No dams, No trees cut, No harbors, No dredging, No rerouting waterways, No railroads, No pipelines, No spills, No right-of-ways, No runways, No wetlands removed, No excavations, No tundra destroyed, No eminent domain takings and costs, No construction costs, and No annual maintenance costs.
No Problem!
Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn't be done. - Amelia Earhart
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