4 ms·
It could easily be a drone. It's happened before - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB8D2QZ9lA4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB8D2QZ9lA4 It's unlikely to be
by mapt 6y ago
It could easily be a drone. It's happened before - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB8D2QZ9lA4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB8D2QZ9lA4
It's unlikely to be an electric vehicle if it's carrying a full-sized human. You just need so much weight in batteries & swept area for props for more than a couple minutes of flight that it's difficult to pack it into a form factor anything like the size & shape of a human.
Given the location and the current state of the technology, though, a liquid fueled jetpack is perfectly possible. It doesn't have to be very efficient if the flight is only a few minutes long. A typical helicopter may achieve 5 hours in the air without any lift to glide ratio. Jets are less efficient, but still efficient enough for short flights.
You may infer a TWR limitation of jet aircraft. It's real, but it's not driven by technical limitations of the jet propulsion technology, but rather by maximizing the range using optimal amounts of lift & fuel for a fixed mass of engine. It doesn't make much sense to use engines so powerful & heavy as a fraction of aircraft mass that they can hover straight up to cruising altitude; If you had engines that powerful, you would be hanging a bigger fuel tank on the vehicle and launch it conventionally. VTOL at high subsonic or faster is an exceedingly range-limited means of flight.