Personal Electric Plane: "Take off like helicopter , fly like a plane."

Personal Electric Plane: "Take off like helicopter , fly like a plane."

More than half of all personal aircraft accidents occur during takeoffs or landings. That’s why inventor and entrepreneur JoeBen Bevirt—known for designing airplane-like wind energy turbines—is intent on making runways obsolete. Bevirt with his wind energy team created a personal electric airplane called S2 that takes off vertically, like a helicopter, and flies aerodynamically, like an airplane.

Its in-built computers adjust motor speed 4,000 times per second to optimize efficiency, reduce noise, and improve flight control and Retractable arms reposition the motors to transition between vertical takeoff, forward flight, and landing.

No full-scale prototype exists yet, but Bevirt and his team have built about two dozen 10-pound models to demonstrate their concept works. Supercomputer simulations of a full-scale, 1,700-pound S2 suggest it could fly two people about 200 miles (New York City to Boston) in an hour on 50 kilowatt-hours of electricity, or roughly equivalent to 1.5 gallons of fuel used by a typical two-seat airplane—which would make the new aircraft about five times more efficient.

In the coming years , we might be seeing more personal planes of such kind zooming in the sky than the passenger planes we see today , though not everyone would be able to afford them.