I know batteries are hip and green, but that range is kind of silly. They should give liquidpiston a call. LiquidPiston X-Engine takes flight [Long] on Vimeo
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10 more minutes of flight time and that thing would get me safely to the office. That kind of commute might be worth it, if I could afford it.
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Yeah, I should have clarified: “Safely in terms of battery life and distance. For other things, no guarantees.”
Also, I’d have to navigate around two different U.S. Air Force bases. I assume they’d look askance at any attempts to transit their airspace.
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Just follow the corridor, marked by tracer bullets.
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Low and slow and they will just think that you are a Yugo.
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At a maximum pilot weight of 210lbs, even if I went completely anorexic and unhealthily skinny, a person my height would still be too heavy to use this. As it stands, I’m about 30 lbs too big for it. Looks like I’m going to have to wait for massive battery and electric motor improvements to become cheap before I can try out this particular way to messily get killed in an embarrassing way.
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Not a great sign they wouldn’t take it past an unsurvivable fall height at any point in the video.
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Maybe an Nvidia Jetson Nano?
That’s an oddly specific weight designation. I’m guessing they originally worked out the specs for “approximately 85 kilograms” and then rounded it to the nearest pound for the benefit of American readers?
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Either that or they just put larger and larger people in it until it didn’t fly anymore. That’s how I did it with my homebuilt flying ride! (Current proven max weight capacity = 1 @Brainspore )
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I imagine it comes from the other direction. Something like “we’re getting between 16 and 24 minutes of flight time here, but 24 minutes is Lonnie here who is 140 pounds, we can’t go with that. How big can we go to still get 20 minutes?”
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I’m not getting on your next contraption until you meet more fat people.
I’m sure it works like that out of the box. But judging from how my iPhone behaves now its a few years old, I wouldn’t bank on that spare battery capacity when you really need it.
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They say it has a ballistic parachute, but the vehicle is flying low during the entire video, too low for even a ballistic parachute - no time to actuate it or for it to deploy.
The website doesn’t seem to list a flight ceiling for this thing, maybe you can only fly it low over deserts or something? :-/
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Heavy folks aren’t hard to find. Willing guinea pigs, on the other hand…
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Yeah, that gets me out, too! [Looking at “leftover” screws from DIY furniture package]
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Nope. Not a chance.
Helicopters, you have autorotation.
Planes, you have some glide.
Ultralights, gliders, hang gliders, etc etc… You have real glide slopes.
This? Something goes wrong, and you are falling straight down accelerating at 9.8m/s/s / 32ft/s/s plus whatever speed you were initially travelling, and you are almost certainly going to die.
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I’ve seen a few of these flying machine videos over the months & years and I’m not 100% convinced that the videos are genuine.
Not saying they are necessarily fake.
Just that I think there is a non-zero chance of fakery.
Now I know it’s hard to prove real but anyone out there with video experience able to offer an objective opinion?
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The ability to fly low is what appeals to me. I have a fear of heights. Unfortunately, to avoid obstacles like trees, electrical wires, and buildings, that means following roads or flying over water. If travelling slightly higher than commercial trucks, maybe a landing balloon system would be a better option. 
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