Well I be damned. It actually worked. Guess we’e going to see flying cars after all! A Japanese flying company run its test flight for one of its flying cars and it was a success!
Japan’s SkyDrive Inc., among the myriads of “flying car” projects around the world, has carried out a successful though modest test flight with one person aboard.
From the photo above you can see the flying vehicle that looks like a slick motorcycle with propellers lifted several feet (1-2 meters) off the ground, and hovered in a netted area for four minutes. The SkyDrive car is about four meters long and two meters high, just small enough to fit into two average parking spaces and ideal for urban use.
SkyDrive.Inc’s CEO, Tomohiro Fukuzawa, said he hopes “the flying car” can be made into a real-life product by 2023, but he acknowledged that making it safe was critical. Can’t argue with that, don’t want my car running out of power mid-flight.
“Of the world’s more than 100 flying car projects, only a handful has succeeded with a person on board,” he told The Associated Press. I hope many people will want to ride it and feel safe,” he said.
Right now, the SkyDrive model can fly for only 5 to 10 minutes at a low speed of several miles per hour which is hey not bad for a start, most important thing is that it was off the ground. It actually flew so there’s progress still.
It will take a long while as Tomohiro Fukuzawa said because it’s better to be safe than sorry so they’re doing all the can just to make that happen. The next step for the company is to raise the vehicle’s speed up to 60 kilometers per hour and extend flight duration to 30 minutes. Keep that effort up and next thing you know we’ll be flying across countries!
Unlike airplanes and helicopters, the eVTOL, or “electric vertical takeoff and landing,” vehicles offer quick point-to-point personal travel, at least in principle so we’ll see how that goes later in the future once they’re ready for more test.
I don’t know about you guys but this news really got me getting excited for the future. Not bad for a first news of the day. Hopefully we’ll get to see a test drive for one of our own flying cars soon.
