The plane shown does not work in horizontal flight ... In fact, the front ducted fans would blow inside the rear ones. As a result, the efficency of the rear ducted fans would be highly diminished and the plane would not be stable. Moreover, the lower fans are blowing under the wings, which is a very efficient way of destroying lift ! Another idea from a design office that has no reality in an engineering world. Making nice picture means nothing.

I add that the second picture in vertical flight does not work either ... The 8 fans would unleash a tornado of winds on the landing spot. The fork lift and the van would be blown away by the storm as anything in the perimeter.

This has all the hallmarks of 'too good to be true'.

I cannot see how they can generate or store enough energy for this to possibly work. I'm sure that you could build a scale RC model that would fly but a full size real world example is something else entirely. I'm not going to hold my breath on this one.

Ceres makes a good point re the downwash from multiple fans supporting 30+tonnes. It might not be such a problem on hard-standings and other prepared areas, but casual cargo pick-ups and drops in rural, residential or even disaster areas would be interesting. And the debris being kicked up would be as dangerous to the aircraft itself as well as to the surrounding area and onlookers/victims. Still, the small drone aspect has potential......... in a burgeoning market. Clearly a project to watch with interest.

@Deres
Possibly they plan on only using all four fans for VTOL and during horizontal flight just run the upper two, negating the lift problem,
I have no idea how they plan on getting around the other problems you mentioned though.

I think it is a realy neat idea. I hope they work out all the bugs in the design mentioned by the posts above.

This is an underdeveloped concept, for underdeveloped nations. The x-22 concept from Bell worked well, but my guess is the lifting power was not all that great. The small cluster fans are less efficient that one large one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_X-22

Radical, awesome, many apps for.

I think it would have to compete with the "Sky Crane" helicopter.