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"      Three of the four rotors rose briefly above the artificial turf, but the trim was still not right, and after a few seconds Reichert set the machine back down again. Their time was up; they had just half an hour to break down the machine and stow it inside a semi-trailer parked outside, because at 5pm league soccer players would descend and begin kicking balls around the turf where the fragile craft now lay. The Maryland students, meanwhile, pressed on, galvanized by a string of successful flights that edged them stepwise closer to their goal. Each run began with the sounding of a chime, after which the other team members released the rotor tips that they&amp;#039;d been holding and the student in the pilot&amp;#039;s chair began furiously pedaling. Accompanied by the sound of whirring bicycle chain and a periodic clanking, the eight blades rotated slowly, each making only 20 rotations per minute, so that the huge craft (which at 76 pounds weighs a bit more than half as much as its 135-pound pilot) seemed to levitate by sheer force of will.  As the pilot&amp;#039;s seat neared the height of a student&amp;#039;s head standing alongside, the craft hovered for a moment, then began to ease groundward, sliding sideways with increasingly velocity as it descended. After each attempt, the team analyzed data on a laptop computer and reviewed videos of the flight, trying to figure out how to remedy the drifting problem. At 7 pm, they achieved a best-ever altitude of 8.5 feet, in a flight that lasted 31 seconds, all while managing to stay within the prescribed box. The Sikorsky Prize seemed poised to fall. And then, at 9pm, disaster: a hard landing snapped a truss and left Gamera grounded. &amp;quot;#gonnabealongdaytomorrow,&amp;quot; one member tweeted. The day had ended with the Sikorsky still standing, at least for the time being. With the NAA official leaving the Gamera team, and the Atlas team still struggling to optimize its rigging, it seems unlikely the Sikorsky prize money will be claimed in the immediate future. But in the weeks to come, both teams will continue to tweak and modify, trying to steal a march on the other.  And another dark horse lurks: California entrepreneur Neal Saiki, former leader of the Cal Poly project, has secretively launched his own bid with a craft called Upturn. In June, he publicly demonstrated a flight of 10 seconds, then retreated into secrecy. No one knows how much progress he&amp;#039;s made\u2014but if he&amp;#039;s going to step forward and claim the prize, everyone agrees, he&amp;#039;d better do it soon. Jeff Wise is a contributing editor for Popular Mechanics and the author of Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger. For a daily dose of extreme fear,  check out his blog. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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