Toyota TAA-1

The Toyota TAA-1 (also referred to as the TA-1) was a prototype general aviation aircraft substantially built and test flown by Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites under contract with Toyota.

Design and development

First flight of the aircraft took place at the Mojave Airport 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 four years' design work by a team of 40 engineers, many formerly of Boeing and Raytheon, at TMS's Torrance, CA facilities under an entity referred to as Aviation Business Development Office (ABDO). Preliminary research and design was started by ISHIDA Aerospace, Inc. in Texas in the early 1990s and conceptual work completed during the mid-1990s under the guise of a small company created to keep the Toyota name isolated from the project at that stage. 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."