Personal Flight

Bellwether has begun flight-testing its impossibly sexy Volar eVTOL flying supercar design at half scale, but the video appears to confirm our fears: all style with little substance, it appears to be a wobbly quadcopter drone with a flashy bodykit.

Having already carried out flights of its Jet Suit in separate rescue and military demonstrations, UK company Gravity Industries has combined the two as part of a NATO Mountain Warfare Rescue Exercise.

Horizon Aeronautics is prototyping an eVTOL hovercycle concept that uses a complex and interesting split-swashplate "Blainjett" variable pitch rotor system that only exposes half of each fan. Very odd, but Horizon says it's highly efficient.

Zeva is deadly serious about bringing this tail-sitting eVTOL flying saucer to market as a one-person air taxi, and if you can get over the idea of soaring above the city head-first, face-down and Superman-style, it's got some interesting advantages.

If anyone can think of a more perfect name for a personal eVTOL, we're listening! Sweden's Jetson Aero has already sold out the 2022 production run of this cute little single-seat kit build, which is capable of zooming along at 63 mph.

Israel's Air One is a handsome two-seat, 155-mph, 110-mile machine with fold-up wings, focused on fun and practicality. Fascinatingly, it's also a winged design that appears to have no dedicated horizontal thrusters or tilting propulsion.

Japan's Tetra Aviation plans to start delivering single-seat electric VTOL lift and cruise aircraft to customers by the end of 2022, and it has now released video footage of its Mk-5 aircraft making test flights in California.

A milestone for California's JetPack Aviation today. Six years after David Mayman's historic jetpack flight around the Statue of Liberty, the company has made its first two sales: a pair of 6-jet, 120 mph JB-12 jetpacks to an unnamed military buyer.

Japan's Tetra Aviation won a hundred-grand "disruptor award" at the GoFly personal flight contest last year, and has now presented its first commercial product at OshKosh: a 33-rotor Mk5 personal eVTOL it hopes to begin delivering to buyers in 2022.

After spending 18 months building an entirely new form of flight control software, California's Jetpack Aviation has finished flight testing the odd-looking first prototype of the Speeder, a high-speed, jet turbine-powered flying motorcycle.

Electric VTOLs are shaping up as something you'll use as a service, rather than something you'd buy and keep in your garage for personal use. But Next UAS wants to re-open the conversation on personal ownership, with this single-seat iFly concept.

Last month, we reported on astonishing first flight footage from the Copterpack, an Australian electric personal flight device. Now, eagle-eyed pixel peepers have scrutinized the video and presented evidence that a tether wire has been edited out.