A Kansas City crew of engineers and makers, back in the arena — competing to reinvent heavy vertical lift and carry more than four times our weight into the sky.
DARPA's Lift Challenge is a call to revolutionize heavy vertical lift aviation. Teams must build an aircraft light enough — yet powerful enough — to carry a payload of more than four times its own weight around a five-nautical-mile circuit, all within a tight flight corridor and time limit.
It's the kind of audacious, build-it-and-fly-it problem the Space Pirates were made for. We're bringing years of hard-won engineering from our power-beaming days to a brand-new arena — and chasing a share of a $6.5 million purse.
Our heavy-lift aircraft is built to carry far more than its own weight — and that capability travels. In the near term, it can outperform today's agricultural sprayers, carry cargo into hard-to-reach places like rural Alaska, and support defense logistics.
Longer term, the same breakthroughs open the door to airborne wind energy — aircraft that generate power aloft to help feed the data centers driving the AI economy. We design with AI, and under Turner Systems we're turning hard aerospace engineering into a new class of opportunity.