It’s like two of our favorite futures in one! If you noticed the new Flyboard Air looks a lot like those water-powered hoverboards you’ve seen people using to do endless hydro-powered backflips, that’s not entirely a coincidence because it’s made by the same company, Zapata Racing. You might also be drawing mental parallels because they also like to use it over water for very obvious, very real safety reasons.
Among those reasons are some very impressive specs, though—albeit similar to the ones that JetPack Aviation is working on for their JB-9 model. According to Zapata Racing, the FlyBoard Air is capable of reaching an altitude of 10,000 feet, speeds up to around 93 mph, and an autonomous operating time of about ten minutes. By the looks of the video, it’ll be ten minutes of pure bliss/terror, depending on how you feel about heights.
The Air won’t be available commercially in 2016, because they’re understandably still in the prototype phase, and you can probably expect things to be held up even further as products like this take off and legal regulation looms. In the meantime, The Verge scored an interview with Zapata Racing CEO Franky Zapata, wherein he explains how the board works and also mentions that you’ll want at least 50-100 hours of practice on one of the water-based flyboards before taking to the sky. Even then, I’d imagine you might still feel safer with some water under you, but hey, at least this hoverboard works over water. Clearly, it has power.
(via The Verge)
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