Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Eight Pilots Just Raced Flying Cars Over Ohio

On October 17, at Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport in Ohio, eight pilots raced flying cars. Not renderings. Not a simulator. Three BlackFly electric vertical takeoff aircraft rotated all day between racing, recharging and demonstration flights, and the organizers say five minutes rarely passed without one overhead. The results were released on October 24, and they read like the results sheet from any good air race – because that is what this was.

Ohio knows this story. The Wright brothers built their machines in Dayton, a short drive away. A century later, the state hosted what may be the most ordinary extraordinary event of the year: a race day, with families, food trucks and a bouncy house, where the race cars happened to fly.

Three races, three different skills

The day tested more than speed. First came the Bull’s Eye Bash, a precision landing challenge. Each pilot aimed at a giant bullseye and tried to set the aircraft down as close to dead center as possible. Brandon Goff won it with a landing just 18 inches from the middle. Eighteen inches. In a flying car.

Next, the Circuit Dash sent pilots racing against the clock – up from takeoff, around a distant grain silo, and back. Tim Lum took the championship. Lum is one of the most experienced electric aircraft pilots anywhere, with more than 1,000 flights in electric machines, and the dash rewarded exactly that kind of seat time.

The final event, the Milk Run, was a two-leg relay for four teams. It went to Quinn Reece and James Robinson – a team of paramedics, as it happens, whose day jobs already run on calm teamwork under pressure.

When the scores were tallied across all three events, Dave Cook was crowned Grand Champion. Cook finished among the top three in every event. His background explains the consistency: a former championship motorcycle racer and a commercial pilot with more than 10,000 flight hours. Speed, precision, patience. He brought all three.

The people behind the day

Race director Heather Chirtea is herself part of the story – the first female flying car pilot and owner in the United States. Her summary of the day is worth repeating because it captures the shift: “When kids look up at the sky today, they don’t have to dream about flying cars anymore. They’re real. They’re flying.”

There was even a bit of paddock mischief. Chirtea orchestrated a playful, top-secret operation to swipe Lum’s victory medal after the Circuit Dash. It got laughs, and it tells you something real about this community. Racing cultures form around machines that actually run, week after week. You do not get in-jokes and medal heists at a trade-show unveiling.

Around the racing, the airfield did what airfields do on a good Saturday. Antique airplanes sat on the grass. Helicopters gave rides. Children bounced, families ate, and every few minutes another BlackFly lifted off. That ordinariness is the news. Personal electric flight stopped being a keynote and became a county-fair attraction – in the best sense.

The aircraft themselves helped the format work. The BlackFly is a single-seat machine that takes off and lands vertically, so a race course does not need a runway – a field, a silo to round, and a bullseye painted on the ground will do. That simplicity is why three aircraft could keep cycling all day without a hangar full of mechanics between flights.

Why a race matters for the industry

Racing has always been aviation’s shortcut to reliability. You learn more from one hard day of back-to-back flights, landings and recharges than from a month of scheduled demos. Three aircraft rotating continuously is a stress test disguised as entertainment: batteries, turnaround discipline, pilot workload, ground crew rhythm. It all gets measured by the clock.

It also builds the pilot pipeline. Personal eVTOL aircraft like the BlackFly ask a new question – how do ordinary, well-trained pilots learn this kind of flying? Events like Springfield put experienced hands and newcomers in the same sky, on the same course, with scores anyone can read. That is how a hobby becomes a discipline. The bigger machines are on a parallel track – Archer’s planned Texas air taxi networks aim at city travel, while races like this one grow the culture of personal flight underneath them.

And there is a public-acceptance dividend. A resident who has watched a quiet electric aircraft land within 18 inches of a target, three times in an afternoon, files a different mental report than one who has only seen a headline. Familiarity is infrastructure too. It is the same effect, at airfield scale, that driverless airport rides are having on the ground in Las Vegas – the future stops being abstract the first time you watch it work.

The takeaway

If you want to know where personal flight is heading, watch Ohio. Not the renderings – the race sheets. Eight pilots, three aircraft, one Grand Champion, and a landing measured in inches. The next Great American Electric Air Race will draw bigger crowds and, very likely, more aircraft. The Wright brothers would have recognized the format instantly. Show up, fly the course, post a time. Everything else in aviation started exactly that way.

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