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High School Students Fly High in NASA Aeronautics Competition

NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate has selected the winners of its high school contest to describe the passenger and cargo aircraft of the future.

Tom Neuman, a senior from George Walton Comprehensive High School in Marietta, Ga., and Aditya Singh, a senior from Anglo-Chinese Junior College in Singapore, won top prizes for essays about their concepts for multi-functional personal air vehicles.

More than 140 teenagers from 50 schools across the United States and 15 foreign countries submitted 65 entries in four categories: U.S. individual, U.S. team, non-U.S. individual and non-U.S. team. The top teams were three eleventh-graders from West High School in Torrance, Calif., and three ninth-graders from the National High School of Computer Science, Tudor Vianu, Bucharest, Romania.

"It is wonderful to see high school students from all over the world thinking about the future of aeronautics and writing down their ideas about potential solutions for the challenges facing the global aviation enterprise," said Juan Alonso, manager of the mission directorate's Fundamental Aeronautics Program. "The students' inventiveness and creativity is extremely impressive."

NASA's Fundamental Aeronautics Program sponsored the annual competition. The entries were reviewed by NASA managers and engineers. The judges based their scores on how well students focused their papers and how well they addressed four basic criteria: informed content, creativity and imagination, organization, and writing.

NASA will award the top scoring papers from the U.S. with a trophy and a cash prize of $1,000 for the individual award winner and $1,500 for the team. Non-U.S. students will receive a trophy, but are not eligible for cash prizes. All participants will receive a NASA certificate and a personal letter of commendation.

A complete list of winners of the high school contest can be found at:

http://aero.larc.nasa.gov

For more information about NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, visit:

http://aeronautics.nasa.gov

Source: NASA