Toyota TAA-1
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The Toyota TAA-1 (also referred to in the press as the TA-1) was a prototype general aviation aircraft built by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites under contract with Toyota.
First flight of the aircraft took place at the Mojave Spaceport 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, 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 fours years' design work by a team of 40 engineers, many formerly of Boeing and Raytheon, at TMS's Long Beach facilities. 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." Scaled Composites 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 prototype TAA-1 is a 4-place, single piston engine aircraft powered by an "engine produced by an outside manufacturer", according to Toyota, and presumably built by Textron Lycoming. (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 fuselage of the aircraft is carbon fiber, constructed in a one piece co-cured single-molded configuration. 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.
