Personal Flight
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Wisconsin's Ascend Dynamics has been flight-testing an 80-lb (36-kg) electric jetpack device with 12 coaxial rotors and an aluminum trellis frame. The company hopes to raise enough cash to build a powerful carbon fiber version for production.
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JPA's Speeder is a highly modular Air Utility Vehicle, a transition-capable drone platform running on insanely powerful jet turbines. It can be configured as a manned flying motorcycle or high-speed cargo drone, and prototype P1.5 is now in testing.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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