Remember Dr Emmett Brown and Morty Mcfly from ‘Back to the future’? In the second part of the series that came out in 1989, when they visit the future (2015), they find people travelling in flying cars and even converted their ‘time-travelling DeLorean’ into one.
Well, that might have been a little exaggeration of the early 21st century back then, as it is 2017 and we don’t have any flying cars around yet (Duh!). But it seems like we are not too far away from living that fantasy.
On Thursday, April 20th, ‘Lilium Aviation’, a German startup conducted the first successful test flight of their vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft. As the name suggests, the aircraft takes off vertically and does not need a long runway.
The aircraft is small in size and is being developed for personal use, just like a car.
According to the company, the aircraft can achieve a range of more than 300 km with a maximum cruising speed of 300 km/h.
What else, the aircraft runs on electrical energy. So it will not deplete environmental resources while flying and will produce very less noise (lesser than a motorcycle).
While the prototype version of the aircraft is a two-seater, the company is planning for a five-seater version to create an air-taxi service. Lilium co-founder and CEO Daniel Wiegand said,
Here’s the video of the test flight, uploaded by Lilium.
https://youtu.be/ohig71bwRUE
While it is not clear that when the aircraft will actually be available commercially, the test flight has certainly given a peek into the glorious future of personalised air travel.
News Source: electrek