Blackbird (wind-powered vehicle)

[1] It was constructed by Rick Cavallaro and John Borton of Sportvision, sponsored by Google and Joby Energy in association with the San Jose State University aeronautics department.

In both cases, power comes from the difference in velocity between the air mass and the ground, as received by the vehicle's rotor or wheels.

[7] The same year, team members Rick Cavallaro and John Borton of Sportvision, sponsored by Google and in association with the San Jose State University aeronautics department, built a test vehicle nicknamed Blackbird.

[5] After proposing the vehicle's design, and presenting the analysis to demonstrate its viability, the Blackbird team learned that others had previously conceived and built similar designs: most notably, aerodynamics engineer Andrew B. Bauer, later with the Douglas Aircraft Company, built and demonstrated such a vehicle in 1969, based on an analysis presented in a student's paper from some twenty years earlier.

On 24 March 2010, the team ran the vehicle on the Ivanpah dry lake bed south of Las Vegas, Nevada, showing that it could accelerate dead downwind from a standstill and reach velocities well in excess of wind speed.

[1][18] On June 16, 2012, Blackbird set the world's first certified record for going directly upwind, without tacking, using only power from the wind.

[1] In 2021, University of California, Los Angeles physics professor Alexander Kusenko disputed the claim citing the role of possible wind gusts and other factors in the apparent accomplishment, having seen a YouTube video on the Veritasium channel by Derek Muller.

[19] Although Kusenko conceded the bet on a technicality, he stated that he saw no evidence that Blackbird exceeded the speed of the wind, following the given constraints of the experiment.