NASA has recently announced a competition for eco-minded aircraft designers, one in which low-carbon flying machines will compete for a $1.5m prize at a contest to be held in California in 2011.

The competition will be run and organized by NASA’s light-aircraft collaborator organization, the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency Foundation. It will be known as the CAFE Green Flight Challenge (CGFC), and competing aircraft will be assessed in flight trials to take place at the Charles M Schulz Sonoma County Airport in Santa Rosa, California, in July 2011.

Congress passed hike in corporate average fleet fuel economy (CAFE) in 32 years in 2007. This was a much needed regulation but it left a lot of details undefined. Basically all it stated was that CAFE would be boosted to 35 mpg by 2020, but was very vague on the specific on how we would gradually get to that point.

Now, under the Obama Administration, the Department of Transportation has defined a plan to require automakers’ car efficiencies at 30.2mpg and trucks (including SUVs, pickups and minivans) to have an average fuel efficiency of 24.1mpg by 2011 for an increase of 2mpg over the standard of 2010.

Auto companies are of course, not happy. They have protested saying that it will cost the industry $1.5 billion. Although they didn’t mention that two of said companies have already received $17.4 billion in federal loans and have also asked for an additional $21.6 billion.