The Toyota TAA-1 (also referred to as the TA-1) was a prototype

general aviation General aviation (GA) is defined by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as all civil aviation aircraft operations with the exception of commercial air transport or aerial work, which is defined as specialized aviation services ...

aircraft substantially built and test flown by

Burt Rutan Elbert Leander "Burt" Rutan (; born June 17, 1943) is a retired American aerospace engineer and entrepreneur noted for his originality in designing light, strong, unusual-looking, and energy-efficient air and space craft. He designed the record- ...

Scaled Composites Scaled Composites (often called simply Scaled) is an American aerospace company founded by Burt Rutan and currently owned by Northrop Grumman. It is located at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California, United States. Founded to develo ...

under contract with

Toyota is a Japanese multinational automotive manufacturer headquartered in Toyota City, Aichi, Japan. It was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda and incorporated on . Toyota is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world, producing about 10 ...

Design and development

First flight of the aircraft took place at the

Mojave Airport The Mojave Air and Space Port at Rutan Field is in Mojave, California, United States, at an elevation of . It is the first facility to be licensed in the United States for horizontal launches of reusable spacecraft, being certified as a sp ...

on May 31, 2002. The project was a joint effort of Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) and Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Inc (TMS) to determine if "Toyota's aerodynamics and low-cost production technologies could be applied to the small aircraft sector." Although Toyota announced the

first flight The maiden flight, also known as first flight, of an aircraft is the first occasion on which it leaves the ground under its own power. The same term is also used for the first launch of rockets. The maiden flight of a new aircraft type is alwa ...

, Company executives have remained relatively silent about the project, and many in the general aviation industry were unaware that the aircraft was even being built. The first flight was the culmination of four years' design work by a team of 40 engineers, many formerly of

Boeing The Boeing Company () is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, telecommunications equipment, and missiles worldwide. The company also provides leasing and product ...

and

Raytheon Raytheon Technologies Corporation is an American multinational aerospace and defense conglomerate headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. It is one of the largest aerospace and defense manufacturers in the world by revenue and market capitaliza ...

, at TMS's Torrance, CA facilities under an entity referred to as Aviation Business Development Office (ABDO). Preliminary research and design was started by ISHIDA Aerospace, Inc. in Texas in the early 1990s and conceptual work completed during the mid-1990s under the guise of a small company created to keep the Toyota name isolated from the project at that stage. A Toyota official would only say, "We are studying the potential for a single-engine piston plane but there is not a lot we can say."

turned the Toyota engineers' design work into reality and hosted the flight test program at Mojave. Rutan, in a public address, called the aircraft "the aeronautical equivalent to the

Lexus LS400 The is a full-size luxury sedan (F-segment in Europe) serving as the flagship model of Lexus, the luxury division of Toyota. For the first four generations, all LS models featured V8 engines and were predominantly rear-wheel-drive. In the four ...

." The prototype TAA-1 is a 4-place, single

piston engine A reciprocating engine, also often known as a piston engine, is typically a heat engine that uses one or more reciprocating pistons to convert high temperature and high pressure into a rotating motion. This article describes the common featu ...

aircraft powered by an "engine produced by an outside manufacturer", according to Toyota, and presumably built by

Textron Lycoming Lycoming Engines is a major American manufacturer of aircraft engines. With a factory in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Lycoming produces a line of horizontally opposed, air-cooled, four, six and eight-cylinder engines including the only FAA-certi ...

. (in the 1990s, Toyota attempted to adapt one of their Lexus engines for aviation purposes, but eventually shelved the project due to an industry downturn). The wing, as well as the fuselage, of the aircraft is

carbon fiber Carbon fiber-reinforced polymers (American English), carbon-fibre-reinforced polymers (Commonwealth English), carbon-fiber-reinforced plastics, carbon-fiber reinforced-thermoplastic (CFRP, CRP, CFRTP), also known as carbon fiber, carbon compo ...

, constructed in a one piece co-cured single-molded configuration. The fuselage was fabricated by Rocky Mountain Composites, Inc. using a proprietary fiber wetting and placement technique, the wings were produced by Radius Engineering, Inc. with a modified resin transfer molding process. The project was unique for Scaled Composites as never before had an aircraft been completed there using composite wing and fuselage structures that were designed and fabricated elsewhere. The empty weight of the prototype was significantly beyond predictions and the unsubstantiated rumors within the industry are that the aircraft's performance during the test flight was below what was expected, and it does not appear that much flight test activity followed the initial flight. The prototype aircraft remains stored in a Scaled Composites

hangar A hangar is a building or structure designed to hold aircraft or spacecraft. Hangars are built of metal, wood, or concrete. The word ''hangar'' comes from Middle French ''hanghart'' ("enclosure near a house"), of Germanic origin, from Frankish ...

. A follow-on design, TAA-2, (substantially similar airframe with retractable landing gear, upgraded avionics and higher performance engine with constant speed propeller) was also envisioned however never made it to the prototype stage. After several years of negotiation for a potential joint venture with the general aviation piston aircraft market leader of that time, interest in the TAA-1 declined after the initial flight test and that outside partnership development evaporated shortly thereafter.

References

External links

Article in Embry Riddle archiveFirst flight image at Mojave Virtual Museum site
{{Scaled Composites Scaled Composites