Hoverbike Dreams

How safe would a hoverbike be? Because of weight limitations, flying motorcycles would have little safety structure (though the safety cage of the 20-minute Jetson One is impressive). Hovering is probably about as safe as riding a motorcycle, which is to say, not very. And flying a fully certificated plane piloted by a fully certificated […]

Another pesky regulation has to do with airspace. To put it in context, the FAA’s airspace restrictions are so complex that few active pilots understand them from top to bottom. They typically know the regs just well enough in most cases to avoid getting intercepted by fighter jets. An ultralight can only fly in unregulated […]

The other pathway for manufacturers to pursue, if they want to blow right past the 254-pound weight limit, is to get the craft approved by the FAA under one of a couple different regulatory frameworks, Part 23 or Light Sport Aircraft. The process for Part 23 certification is intensive and extremely expensive, costing tens if […]

The allure of flying an airplane is that, to state the obvious, it goes into the air. Hovering? Not so much. The point of hovering eludes us. If you want to go very fast on or near the surface, get a motorcycle. They’re cheap, legal and easy enough to ride. While hovering craft have long […]

For starters, for everyone to have a flying motorcycle in their garage, the mythical beast would have to be legal to fly. As far as the FAA is concerned, that means one of two things. The easiest and cheapest route for the manufacturer is to build what the FAA refers to as an ultralight vehicle—the […]

The rules of the natural world are unbending, and when people try to bend nature to their desires, it’s the people and not the rules that get bent. Physics dictate that to lift something, you need to exert a certain amount of force. The heavier the object being lifted, the more force you need. When […]