Swedish Man’s Magic Carpet Is a Thing of Beauty, Nightmares

It's like flying on a bed of highly combustible fan blades

July 26, 2016 9:00 am

Unless they’re behind a safety grate and circulating cool air, we try to avoid sitting next to whirring metal blades. Same goes for highly combustible gas engines.

But that’s just us. Do you, man.

So goes the story of an unidentified Swedish inventor who’s been posting a series of frightening YouTube videos depicting him riding a bed of motorized, gas-powered, high-speed propellers.

The DIY magic carpet, which he calls a “manned multicopter,” is made of one-tube lattice frame with a simple box seat placed in the middle. The homemade contraption is controlled by a hard-wired R/C controller, can reach heights up of to 15 feet and sounds like a swarm of bees when it’s aloft.

Given the craft’s tenuous relationship with not blowing up, you’d assume that he’d be careful, but from what it sounds like, the stalwart Swede has no problem throwing caution to the wind.

“As it turns out, it’s failing every time I have a flight session on it. So when everything works, I get in it as fast as possible to get to fly a little bit before anything happens,” he says in one of the videos. “That’s really not a good way of handling safety, but it worked for me today and I’m really glad I did it.”

Even if you want to, please don’t try this at home.

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