Graduate student Geoffrey Andrews won second place in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Individual Aircraft Design Competition.

The challenge in the competition was to design a multi-mission amphibian aircraft capable of both passenger and cargo missions.

According to AIAA’s background for the competition, island nations and developing countries often have limited resources and land to create airports. Air passenger and cargo commerce would be useful in the economic development in outlying communities. Many of these communities do have access to bodies of water or short runways that could be used to transport passengers or cargo. There are also niche markets that could benefit from this type of aircraft (shuttle services for commuters in cities like Seattle, New York etc. where existing airports are some distance from the city center). The current aircraft are limited in size to less than 20 passengers and as conversions of land planes are not optimized for amphibious operations.