For years, personal vertical takeoff and landing vehicles (otherwise known as VTOL) have been heralded as the future of mobility, with companies like Uber, Boeing and Lilium making various promises about when we’ll see a flying taxi in major cities. But while they take their time with planning and prototyping, another company called Hoversurf has been conducting real-world tests for years.
Hoversurf describes itself as an “urban air mobility technology company,” but its standout product is the S3 (short for Scorpion), a hoverbike. When we wrote about the Russian outfit’s quad-rotor, joystick-controlled flying machine back in 2018, Dubai police had reportedly partnered with Hoversurf and were testing the bikes.
Now, video has surfaced of one of the Dubai police’s hoverbike tests in which everything you think could possibly go wrong does:
As the Drive reported, this video was for some reason originally uploaded to Hoversurf’s official YouTube page before being deleted and reuploaded on Videokings. After the video went viral, the company has offered some explanation for the wild crash.
“Hoversurf admitted in the now-removed video’s description that the crash was the result of a mechanical failure,” wrote the Drive. “Hoversurf’s website states that the S3’s maximum safe operating altitude is 16 feet and that the officer reached around 30 meters (almost 100 feet) at their highest, possibly due to the acknowledged malfunction of the vehicle’s various systems.”
You might be wondering, how did the operator not get a hand, leg, finger or other extremity sliced off after nose-diving into the concrete on a flying blender? “All safety systems worked well, and the pilot was not injured,” wrote Hoversurf, according to the Drive.
If those are the safety systems in action, we’ll gladly stay on the ground.
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