Recipients of awards

Ivo Boscarol, direktor podjetja Pipistrel d.o.o. Ajdovščina, ki je trenutno vodilno svetovno podjetje na področju načrtovanja in izdelave lahkih letal. Je  prvi zasebni izdelovalec letal v Jugoslaviji in je ustanovitelj ter direktor podjetja Pipistrel. Podjete Pipistrel niza uspeh za uspehom, leta 2004 je letalo Sinus postavilo svetovni rekord kot prvo ultralahko letalo, ki je letelo okoli sveta.

Ivo Boscarol is a producer of ultralight and light aircraft, based in Ajdovščina, Slovenia. at Pipistrel Aircraft. He is responsible for central company guidelines and sales trends. Boscarol is most known as an aircraft designer and entrepreneur. In the eighties of the past century the era of hang gliding and powered hang gliding arrived and Boscarol, though flying private aircraft of any kind was not legal, started an own private business, Boscarol studio, a small-scale production of motorized hang gliders, mainly for customers in the neighboring Italy. He had to test his prototypes, first hang gliders, later ultra-light airplanes, and to avoid too much attention he flew between dusk and darkness. The flying times and shape of the wings earned the aircraft the nickname “pipistrel”, a word locals use in dialect for bat. It is derived from Latin Pipistrellus, the locals got it from the Italian pipistrello.

Boscarol used the word to name his new company, Pipistrel. After a struggling first decade the markets began to open up following the exhibition of Pipistrel Sinus ultra-light aircraft at the 1995 AERO Friedrichshafen European general aviation trade show. Commitment to light designs and fuel efficiency, possible especially in the category of motor gliders paved the way to wide recognition of the company and his ideas.

Most visible was the successful participation at several NASACentennial Challenges, prize contests aimed at engaging the public at large to help advance the aeronautic and space technologies. It all began with the 2007 NASA Personal Air Vehicle (PAV) Challenge competition (Pipistrel Virus) and was followed in 2008, when the event was renamed to NASA General Aviation Technology Challenge (GAT). The most important of all was the participation at the Google-sponsored 2011 NASA Green Flight Challenge (GFC) competition with a $1,350.000 main prize, the largest in aviation history.

Competition rules asked for an aviation breakthrough. The competing aircraft were required to fly 200 miles in less than two hours; reach an average speed of at least 100 mph; take off at a distance of less than 2,000 feet to clear a 50-foot obstacle; deliver a decibel rating of less than 78 dBA at full-power takeoff while using less than one gallon of gasoline per occupant. 10 planes entered the competition, 3 of them actually flew and only 2 met the above requirements. The contest-winning Taurus G4 electric plane was of an unconventional design, with two fuselages and a large (200 horsepower) motor in between. Such a design was required to accommodate the over 75 kilowatt-hours of lithium-ion polymer batteries, nearly half the weight of a 2,350 pound plane.

The development of this aircraft, led by Boscarol, 5 months from concept to production was achieved using high performance computing (HPC) technologies including computational fluid dynamics. It won the 2014 HPC Innovation Excellence Award.