Here at New Atlas we love a good hoverbike. So when Kalashnikov, the Russian weapons manufacturer best known for its infamous AK-47 assault rifle, released a video demonstrating a strange hoverbike prototype it certainly piqued our interest.
The video quietly dropped on YouTube on Monday. Rather perfunctorily titled "Kalashnikov presented a flying motorcycle", it shows the flying bike being demonstrated to some officials in a warehouse.
The unnamed vehicle is pretty rudimentary – eight rotors on a simple frame seemingly powered by a few small batteries and controlled with some standard joysticks. However, it looks like an aerodynamic shell has been designed to go over the frame.
It certainly isn't the most sophisticated looking hoverbike we've ever seen, especially coming from a large corporation with what one would assume must be a large research and development budget. It's definitely more stable than our favorite DIY hover bike, a crazy craft from inventor Colin Furze, and it looks a little safer than another crazy Russian invention we spied earlier this year called the Hoversurf Scorpion, which mounts its unprotected props at a perfect leg-amputation level.
In recent years, a couple of companies have been working to get a commercial hoverbike off the ground, including Aero-X and Malloy Aeronautics, the latter of which has attracted the interest of the US Army, but none are being offered to consumers just yet. A bunch of crazy home inventors have also been tinkering away, often with hobby-grade materials, making a variety of flying devices.
With Kalashnikov's recent announcement moving into the AI weapon game, it's not entirely surprising to see the company branching out into an aerial vehicle of this type. But with so many similar inventions literally flying around, both amateur and professional, it seems a commercial hoverbike is an inevitability.
Source: Kalashnikov Group YouTube
