A little one - looks pretty good.
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Hi Doug, very impressive. Some information and photos on:
Technical specifications (“aircraft + travel case weight 75 LBS / 34 kg” and other specifications) on:
The speed of 65 MPH (29 meters per second) and the video you linked, indicate that perhaps a crosswind tethered EVTOL AWES version would be a possibility.
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Ohhhh nope
Not for me
reminds me of those Kangaroo boots I used to have
Scary
Definitely best to use it for airborne wind energy instead
By the scale of the pack between the foot pads
I’d guess that’s about 1.5 kilowatt hours of battery in that space
Roughly equals 15 kilograms
So removing the battery, And the human rider, Gets you ~250 kilograms lift
It only lasts 20 minutes so , You’d have to send at least 3~4kW up the cable.
That’s a lot of generation to offset
So we have to either lift up a heavy kite turbine or fly crosswind and regen aloft
Not convinced yet
Looks dangerous to me. There’s a reason these little single-human-carrying drones always fly over water, or stay low enough over land to hopefully survive if anything goes wrong. I’m thinking like broken arms, legs, neck, back, pelvis, or being chopped up by the exposed blades - who knows?
But the performance is impressive, at least from a quick video.
Hey, wait - maybe they could be used to “get one person to the airport quicker”! yes, I think we’ve found the main use case - getting people to the airport - a place where there is access to actual reliable and safe fuel-powered aviation, capable of taking you somewhere over a long distance, hopefully without killing you… 
OK thanks for identifying it Pierre: I went to the website and found, yes, the main “use case” is indeed getting to the airport! Kind of like the main “use case” for “AWE” has become “disaster relief”.
It’s small and light enough to qualify as “luggage”, so what else do you need? Obviously, probably by later this year, people will be flying in to major airports on these, and folding them up as “luggage” to “lug” through the terminal. Unless, wait a minute - will they allow the batteries onboard the airplane?
Will they allow you to fly anywhere near an actual airport in the first place???
Hmmm… maybe time to find a new “use case”. How about getting kids to school? What could possibly go wrong there? How about just going over to your friend’s house? Delivering newspapers? Going to the store? What about “inspecting power lines”? What about using to hike while camping? You could charge it up with that Danish camping windmill!
Of course, being near Los Angeles, it’s found a publicity niche in a Spiderman movie. So funny - living here I look at such movies as nothing but one more “product”, for idiots to waste their time watching - would never watch such repetitive drivel - oh well, call me jaded, and you would be right.
So their website is still talking about how many they have in stock in 2024 (3). Maybe time for an update. But don’t worry - you can put down a $100 deposit! Why is it always “a deposit”? I guess you can’t actually just buy one. I signed up for being sent actual PRICING! They don’t want to put pricing on their website - maybe too scary.
I could see a military use - imagine 100 of them carrying soldiers with machine guns! Look out below! Only thing is, they might make easy targets themselves… :0…
Flying a $78,000 Human Drone Flight Vehicle | SkySurfer Manned Drone / Flying Hoverboard Aircraft
The author of the video is Hunter Kowald and is mentioned, as the founder of SkySurfer Aircraft Inc., on
Not a so good possibility, because reaching relatively high speed (29 m/s) as a kite would lead to a low angle of attack, resulting in a low efficiency of the wind turbines.
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Hi Pierre: As you can see in the video, which looks like it was taken near here, our biggest problem is dust!
This is a great entertaining video. The pilot found the answer to dust - fly it in the snow!
Special Operations vet commutes by Flying Car from rural off-grid home
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Bloomberg Interview with JoeBen Bevirt of Joby:
This link should take you to the part of the video where they interview him:
Markets Prepare for Nvidia GTC, New FTC Chair on Trump | Bloomberg Technology
They are of course asking when someone will be able to take one of these EVTOL-icopters to the airport,
Remember, it was gonna be 2025?
OK now it looks like the new talking-point year is “2026”…
Well I mean, now that it IS 2025, they kind of HAVE to say that, right?
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Still hilarious if you’re Scottish to hear they’re going to be filling the seats in their flying joby
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OK I had to look that one up. Yeah, funny.
To me, a big red flag on the EVTOL landscape is the fixation of “4 passengers and a pilot” taking a “trip to airport”, as though that is some huge multi-billion-dollar market that could possibly get them out of the financial holes they are already in - the ones who haven’t yet gone bankrupt like Lillian…
Meanwhile, even before the plane hitting the helicopter in DC, large, busy airports have been trying to get rid of helicopters and even small planes (general aviation) because they are dangerous traffic hazards in such an already crowded and chaotic operational airspace. The LAST thing they need is a whole lot of small flying aircraft, coming in late for the connecting flights, causing more confusion and mid-air collisions!
Once again, it’s part of the delusional derangement syndrome - they are “electric” so they will “save the world”. Except the main thing in aircraft design is low weight (not heavy batteries), and also helicopters have a large rotor for a reason - its more efficient. You may notice all these airport-hopping efforts always mention targeting very short flights - then they have to rest and charge up again. I guess meanwhile they are stranded at the charging station, not makeing any money. So all these companies have a product which, if ever certified, would have limited use, and they are all competing for the same market - going to the airport. Sounds really lame to me.
Like this drone with just two larger rotors being more efficient - comments mention how it will lead back to a helicopter.:
[Falcon Mini bicopter drone: a nimble alternative to quadcopters](Falcon Mini bicopter drone: a nimble alternative to quadcopters
Imagine, supposed aero people, not only targeting heavy batteries to yield a low-range, limited-use aircraft, but using a known less-efficient lifting concept! There’s where the derangement syndrome has taken over their feeble brains.
Then there’s this one, a bit too reminiscent of a vertical-axis wind turbine to be taken too seriously, but hey, who knows, right?
[Falcon Mini bicopter drone: a nimble alternative to quadcopters](Falcon Mini bicopter drone: a nimble alternative to quadcopters
BTW, all the URL info identifying these links as having come from me have been removed!
Lots of eVTOLs and flying cars from China in this video in French.
The market does not seem to be just “going to the airport”, but concerns all urban activities.
It is interesting to see that all the projects or achievements seem to make it possible to occupy the entire urban space, and not just the ground, thus reducing traffic jams.
Hmm. Kitemill currently deploy both prop rpm control and tiltable motor pods in the current actuator system for VTOL. My though is that the tiltable part of the system is slow and hard to implement, compared to having additional thrusters that are permanently fixed.
Coming from this thinking, the Falcon drone doesnt look that great to me