Hoverbikes are finally here, but don't expect to fly cheap

California firm's long-anticipated flying motorcycle will set you back $150,000.

This drone-like flying motorcycle can be yours for $150,000.Hoversurf Official via YouTube

The era of the hoverbike is finally at hand, but you’ll have to be well-heeled to join in. A California company recently announced that it would begin deliveries of its long-anticipated flying motorcycle in the first half of 2019 for an estimated price of $150,000.

The Hoversurf S3 looks a bit like what you’d get if you crossed a motorcycle with a quadcopter. It has a seat for one rider and four horizontally mounted electric propellers controlled by a pair of joysticks.

The sub-250-pound craft is designed to skim over the landscape at the company-specified “safe altitude" of about 16 feet and at speeds of up to 60 miles an hour. Its lithium-manganese-nickel batteries allow airborne jaunts of up to 25 minutes, according to the manufacturer, San Jose-based Hoversurf.

No license is needed to fly the carbon-fiber craft, as its low weight and low speed exempt it from FAA regulations. But with those fast-spinning propellers so close, you might need an extra measure of self-confidence.

“I think it's a good idea assuming that it can be made safe, which is questionable in my mind,” said Richard Anderson, a professor of aerospace engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. “I assume if you ran into somebody it would chop them up.”

Hoversurf’s chief operating officer, Joseph Segura-Conn, said the vehicle has numerous safety features, including a computer-controlled system for stabilizing the craft and laser scanners for detecting and avoiding obstacles. To help ensure the safety of the rider and of anyone who might get in the way, the company plans to offer extensive training to customers — and future models will be carried aloft not by propellers but by enclosed fans.

“It looks frightening at the beginning, and you’re unsure,” said Segura-Conn, who is one of a handful of people who have flown one of the hoverbikes. “But as soon as you get up in the air, there’s no experience like it.” He said the first deliveries would be next May or June.

Hoversurf isn’t the only company developing hoverbikes or similar piloted drones.

Very cool...

Years ago (1983), my girlfriend and I took my grandmom to the movies to see “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi”.

She flipped out over the speeder bikes the Imperial troops were using, the scene where they were racing through the forest. Thought it was THE coolest thing she’d ever seen. She loved that movie.

That was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the article.

Thanks for a good memory... from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

We have lived on a small airport for nearly 25 years. I do not know if many of you remember the gyrocopter craze we had 20 or so years ago. There were lots of them around small airports. They were slow and very noisy. Supposedly if the engine quit you could just autorotate safely to the ground and come in with very slow forward motion. So people thought that they were safe.

So we had this guy who lived across the runway from us who had one. And he seemed to be afraid to leave the pattern with it. So every day he would go round and round the pattern disrupting all the normal air traffic because he was flying about 35 mph while most of the airplanes coming in were doing closer to 100. And when he would go over our house, his unmuffled 4 cylinder engine combined with the helicopter sound of his rotor would just make this god awful noise that irritated the hell out of everyone.

The neighbor who was a Marine and former carrier pilot had been telling me and some others how easy it would be to shoot him down a little earlier in the morning. I was down in our basement and I felt a pretty major vibration and heard a loud boom. I looked out the window and saw what looked like a mini-Hiroshima a few hundred yards away.

My wife went running out the front door along with just about everyone else on the airport. I went to get some garden hose and put on the fire fighter gear I had in the trunk of my car. When she got there the gasoline had all burned up with just a few little spot fires remaining. Someone had thrown a blanket over the body. So she said, “I am a nurse and I need to check to see if he is still alive.” We live with a high percentage of military veterans, so the guys said that he was good and dead. But she insisted and later wished she had not.

The guy had good reason to be nervous about his flying abilities. He had gotten himself into what the authorities later called pilot-induced oscillations. Basically he started going up and down when he was trying to fly straight and level. As he made ever more drastic corrections his head started going up while at the same time the rotor blades were coming down. His seat was several feet ahead of the center of his rotor. He should have had his harness on a little tighter because the blade eventually wacked right through his plastic coated Styrofoam helmet and took the top part of his head off. We were told that it killed him instantly but plowing straight into the ground from several hundred feet sealed the deal.

So everyone was standing around feeling a little sheepish about statements they had made about him in the not so distant past, when our neighbor who lives on the other side of us who is an engineer for the FAA showed up. He said that he was from the FAA and he was taking charge of the scene. Everyone told him to get lost, so he was mad about that for years.

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