Watch someone fly on a real hoverboard on Los Angeles streets

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Originally published at: Watch someone fly on a real hoverboard on Los Angeles streets | Boing Boing

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back to the future GIF

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Frank Black approves…

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I’m hovering, Right Now!

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Tipping over, at best, will hurt.

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Absolute carnage, coming to a city near you soon.

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In a fine example of steaming hot beauracracy getting dumped in your lap, I have to be registered with the FAA to fly a 9 oz. RC airplane, but this contraption does not.

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I got so much flack from fellow kids in high school when I said I could build them a hoverboard for a thousand dollars. I’d based it on a Popular Science ad/article about these heavy-appliance moving sleds that worked using tiiiiny holes drilled into two flat planks you’d slide under, then use a wall-powered belt-mounted fan to lift them up and move them wherever you wanted.

I figured if two could lift an appliance, one would work for a teenager. I was forthcoming in stating it wouldn’t work outside, that it’d probably only work on flat lineoleum, battery life would be a challenge, and control would be an issue (but I figured one could divert a portion of air for minimal direction change)… that it’d be like standing on a garbage can lid on ice.

Everyone teased me for years that I thought I could make a hoverboard, and that I thought hoverboards were real.

Heck, OK… I found this nifty website that archives the different VTOL technologies that are out there, and they have some neat stats on this thing:
Specifications:

  • Aircraft type: eVTOL hoverboard prototype
  • Piloting: 1 pilot
  • Flight control: Unknown
  • Cabin: None, the pilot stands using snow boarding straps to keep your feet locked onto the aircraft
  • Flight time: 1.5 minutes
  • Propellers: 8
  • Electric Motors: 8
  • Batteries: 8 lithium polymer batteries, generating about 40 horsepower
  • Length: Unknown, possibly 2.5 meters wide (over 8 feet wide)
  • Landing gear: 4 fixed landing legs
  • Safety Features: Distributed Electric Propulsion (DEP), provides safety through redundancy for its passengers and/or cargo. DEP means having multiple propellers and motors on the aircraft so if one or more motors or propellers fail, the other working motors and propellers can safely land the aircraft.

https://evtol.news/omni-hoverboards-prototype-2

If you go to their sitemap, that’s a rabbit hole if I’ve ever found one…
https://evtol.news/sitemap

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Could you point me to the FAA guidelines? 'cause I’m like 500% sure this thing would have to be registered.

Oh, well, it is a Canadian company. So that was very USA-centric of me. YMMV.

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FAR part 103 = Manned under 254 lbs = ultralight = no registration.

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Kinda begs the question… Just how scrawny is the guy, and how much cargo capacity would it have?

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I imagine the multi-rotor design would help address the inherent instability of prior designs. Our local aviation museum has long displayed the Hiller Flying Platform from the mid 1950s. They also have an full size simulator that you can stand on and crash without dying though it is often out of order.

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Does the company that made it also make McDonald’s ice cream machines?

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Yea that’s true. Weird to think if you are a big lunch before getting back on your hoverboard, you might have less fly time.

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Hiller came up with some interesting ideas in their time.

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Thought that might be the case, thank you! Fascinating to me that it’s not covered by drone regulations too.

That said, it does makes sense… If you crash a drone into a flight tower, it needs to be registered so they can figure out who to charge. If you’re the pilot, well… they know who the idiot was.

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I wonder if it has an emergency landing mode that does reverse thrust and tries to gently set down a dangling pilot.

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I could see this never hitting the market because of regulatory issues. Certainly flying an aircraft through city streets, like this gentleman is doing, would be highly illegal, and I can’t imagine that’s going to make regulatory bodies look too kindly on the company that provided that aircraft to him…

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This looks like lots of fun.
Does anyone know what sort of battery power source they’re using?

Their site says the flight distance record is ~275 m. That isn’t very practical for getting around, really just for fun. Increasing distance would require a big increase in power, which then produces increases in battery mass, requiring more power to carry the extra batteries. This makes the energy density of the battery really important in scaling up

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