Vertical Flight Society Awards $100,000 in Scholarships

The Vertical Flight Society (VFS) awarded more than US$100,000 to 27 young engineering scholars at 11 universities in the U.S. and Germany to recognize, incentivize, and reward their promise and talent toward advancing vertical flight.

“Since 1977, our Vertical Flight Foundation (VFF) Scholarships have helped inspire generations of students to pursue careers in vertical flight, with many now holding leadership positions in industry, academia and government, with more than 600 scholarships awarded to date,” VFS Executive Director, Mike Hirschberg, said.

Ranging from undergraduates to doctoral candidates, this year’s recipients’ scholarships bring the VFS’s decade-long initiative to more than 230 scholarships totaling more than US$750,000. The VFF was established in 1967 as the philanthropic arm of the American Helicopter Society (now the VFS).

Previous recipients have gone on to prestigious careers at some of the world’s leading enterprises and institutions, including Bell Helicopter, the University of Maryland, Northrup Grumman Aerospace Systems, Boeing, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the U.S. Army Aviation Development Directorate.

The future of flight, it seems, is truly vertical.