The winner is Urban Liner

The hybrid-powered Urban Liner could bring a real breakthrough in passenger air transport, which is no better than Soma Varga and two of his fellow students recently winning the NASA Design Challenge, allowing them to present their plan to US space agency engineers in Langley.

The task of the team of Hungarian, Austrian and German aeronautical engineering students (Sarga Varga, Daniel Metzler, Christian Decher) was not an easy task, as according to the tender they had to design a machine that is much more environmentally friendly than the today’s airplanes. Like the Zunum Aero, the winning team thought of a hybrid solution, but the concept itself is quite different, as while the Zunum Aero has a petrol engine to generate electricity for the electric motors, the Urban Liner has a conventional gas turbine engine with a total of six electric motors. supplemented.

In addition to the Urban Liner’s unusual design, the super-lightweight composite aircraft generates significant buoyancy even with the fuselage design, so overall it needs roughly 60% less fuel than a conventional aircraft, while being able to carry up to 300 passengers. Surely the remarkable solutions will not go unnoticed, as the designers of Urban Liner won the Design Challenge announced by NASA and the German Aerospace Research Center, so their plans could also be presented at a U.S. space agency headquarters in Langley for an all-day conference. framework.