Well this is gruesome. Dr Alastair Kenneth Senior had built the hovercraft from scratch, and was test driving it in front of his family on Muriwai beach in Auckland. Police say a design defect caused one of the rear propeller blades to come free, strike him in the back of the head, and all but decapitate him. Damn. More »
My guess is that most of the guys out there would love their own R/C hovercraft, but the bottom line is that not everyone can afford a fancy commercial version. Well, if you have some junk lying around the house, some time on your hands, and you don’t mind a hovercraft that is butt friggin’ ugly, you can build your own R/C model for under US$50 (depending on what kind of junk you have lying around) and the instructions from Project Hovercraft.
The problem with wheels is that contact with the ground generates drag. So, a simple solution would be to develop an anti-gravity car. No sweat–one already exists. Sure it’s only a few inches tall but hey, this thing could give your action figures the ride of their tiny plastic lives. Thanks to dual ducted fans and a brushless motor, the Axon can hover above the ground and hit speeds of 40kph almost instantly–and a dual brushless motor upgrade will bring it up to 80 kph.
In a move that will cheer up lovers of vehicles that can travel on both water and (very flat) land, students at a German engineering university have built a one-person hovercraft that uses an air thrust system to move and steer.
The patent shown is for an aircraft to be powered off the ground using a plasma technology. Subrata Roy, a University of Florida aerospace engineer, proposes the existing technique of passing a magnetic wave through a conducting fluid can produce a force strong enough to lift an aircraft off the ground. Granted, the example in the patent is only 15 cm, and attempts by others haven’t gone particularly well. But with phrases like magnetohydrodynamics being thrown around, I keep flashing back to the space travel scene in Contact and getting excited. Subrata Roy must be a poet. [WIPO via Ubergizmo]
This admittedly isn’t the newest military tech on the block, but The History Channel in us just couldn’t help writing it up. Russia makes the world’s largest military hovercraft dubbed the “Zubr.” It displaces 621 tons and can haul twice the payload of similar boats from the US Navy (somewhere around 150 tons).
Cornell researchers are working on a way to make hovering vehicles a reality. By pairing superconductors with permanent magnets, they’ve figured out a way to get objects to hover with complete stability without any power necessary.
This ice hovercraft school bus has to be the coolest and worst news ever to descend upon children all over the world. I mean, I would have loved to go to school in one of these spiffy snowspeeders powered by dual fan engines.
Rudy Heeman was meant for greater things, as is obvious by his superhero last name, Heeman. The lunatic mechanic from New Zealand has spent the last 11 years constructing a flying boat / hovercraft. Is there any better way to spend 11 years? We think not. We can only imagine what Mr. Heeman’s telephone conversations entail: More »
