Got a horrible commute? Try a hoverbike!
By Tecca tecca – Fri Jun 10, 4:31 pm ET
Have you ever been sitting in traffic and just wished you could go over the other commuters? Australian mechanical engineer and inventor Chris Malloy has helped that dream get one step closer to reality with his Hoverbike prototype.
The single-passenger vehicle consists of a frame made of Kevlar-reinforced carbon fiber with a foam core, between two horizontal spinning propellers. The propellers are made from Tasmanian oak with a carbon fiber leading edge for strength. The driving controls of the Hoverbike are similar to those of a motorcycle, via handlebar grips. The right grip controls thrust, while the left grip controls the angle of the control vanes that make the Hoverbike go forward or backward. Turning the handlebars left and right turns the vehicle just like a motorcycle.
The Hoverbike will theoretically reach speeds of 173 mph and a height of more than 10,000 feet, but at the moment, it's only been tested while tethered a mere three feet from the ground. That's because while Malloy is very confident in the stability of the machine, he doesn't want to risk breaking the prototype should something unplanned happen. And design and testing are going so well that Malloy hopes to have the Hoverbike into limited production within a year, and full production two years after that. The vehicle is expected to come in at a relatively affordable $40,000, comparable to a high-end motorcycle.
Hoverbike via Geekosystem
Okay, This is Cool: A Working Hoverbike
By Damon Poeter
Luke Skywalker, eat your heart out—Australian Chris Malloy and his partners claim to have invented
an actual, working hoverbike that zips along above the terrain like a
Star Wars landspeeder cruising over the deserts of Tatooine.
"Our goal is to produce an extremely reliable helicopter, designed with rugged simplicity at its heart and true pilot
safety built into the design and operation of the aircraft," Malloy's
hoverbike website states.
The prototype hoverbike can supposedly attain speeds of up to 175 miles-per-hour and could theoretically climb to a height of 10,000 feet. That kind of oomph is presumably slightly more than is needed for what Malloy bills as one of the main uses for his hoverbike, "cattle mustering."
Maybe if cows suddenly sprout wings or
get jet packs.
To be fair, Malloy also thinks his hoverbike, which works like a small helicopter, could replace such aircraft in fields like search and rescue, aerial surveying, firefighting, moviemaking, and power line inspection.
The hoverbike prototype's 1100cc engine is a flat twin four-stroke with one camshaft, four valves per cylinder, and a central balancer shaft. Its two propellers are made of Tasmanian Oak with a carbon fiber leading edge, according to the hoverbike
website's spec sheet.
The hoverbike weighs about 240 pounds. It's almost ten feet long by a bit over four feet wide. The aircraft takes regular unleaded and burns up about eight gallons of fuel per hour in flight, according to the site. That means it gets pretty good mileage, about 21.8 miles-per-gallon, and the bike can travel 92 miles on a single tank of gas.
Of course, not everybody's buying it. The Escapist
points out that while there's a lot of still
photography on Malloy's site, there's no video of the hoverbike in action—though there is
a YouTube video (below) showing the hoverbike in a "smoke test" to demonstrate airflow through the front propeller.
The hoverbike team says it has completed the first stage of testing with a series of tethered flights, according to the website, succeeding at maintaining a controlled hover and maneuvering the vehicle within the hover.
Next up is roll-testing and removing the tethers, according to the hoverbike team.
Malloy and his team are soliciting donations to raise $1.1 million (Australian dollars) to get to the next stage of
development in their project. As of Friday, hoverbike fans had pitched in $69,125, according to the site's
donation page.