nature video
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2018–2022
5:06 · 2.4M views · Nov 21, 2018
Nature video showing MIT researchers flying the first plane with no moving parts, powered by an ion drive that creates an ionic wind from high-powered electrodes. The 5m-wide craft flies across a sports hall.
Linked as a quick demonstration of the ion plane in threads about silent aircraft and flying cars.
4 comments from Hacker News
Older news as other people have mentioned, if you want to see how it works and see it flying here is a YouTube link: this video
Thanks for the commentary guys, it’s been fascinating churning over all this even more. Thoughts: - Safety is the same issue as always, only it’s being ironed out faster than before. Controlled vertical landings, 3D space, and redundancy help a lot. I don’t foresee many flying high enough to get really hurt. Maybe things like undercarriage cushions or redirected waterways underneath major traffic flows could help even more. - Noise cancellation tech is already out there, as well as near-silent aircraft without moving parts: this video - Main arteries will be less condensed, but much more, much smaller traffic will appear and that’s going to be a new problem. The death knell for intracity public transport? - Well-made points about “actual” flying cars not actually being used. Maybe it would have been the same for cars if someone made motorized horses instead of the automobile? Thank you for all the resources. I really liked the random touchdown point, underlining how exact our tech already is. I've polished the post quite a bit, adding a lot of these extra things to it. If anyone can clarify the paper bag problem @brownbat mentioned and what @blunte meant by "s/trans/tele" I'd really appreciate it.
Don't ion drives have ozone as a side-effect? Balloons with solar-powered ion drives might do the trick then - they don't even need to be lighter than air, the ion drive should give it enough thrust this video [LINK]
this video > But it is not a viable propulsion source. At least not on Earth for things larger than a meter or so. It's 5m wide