About a week ago, Aerofex put out an update about the latest developments and test flight of their hovercraft. It’s a single seater with a motorcycle like rider position and, from the video, it definitely shows potential. I watched the videos and looked at the photos and drawings on their website and it’s hard to draw any conclusions, yet.

These days, it isn’t hard to take clear, high resolution photos and video, yet what they show is hard to see clearly, which is why I can’t say much about it. The company has developed some unrelated products like a system for transporting horses in aircraft, a magnetic resistance bicycle trainer and a snowboard switchplate. Mark De Roche, aerospace engineer and CTO at Aerofex, presented a tech paper to the American Helicopter Society concerning Thrust Augmentation and Control of Ducted-Fan Aircraft, which seems to say they are trying to simplify the control of hovercraft like the one they’re building.

This hovercraft has no computer control and software to stabilize the platform, it’s something you have to learn to ride, like a bicycle, but once you do, they say it’s fairly intuitive.

We’ve written about this sort of thing before, with motorcycle engine powered hovercraft and the more recent hoverbike, which really looks great but hasn’t proved itself yet.

If this project from Aerofex works as they say and their next version is better than what you see here, it may have some interesting uses in search and rescue or patrol in areas without roads, or maybe not, but if they can get it running right, it could be a helluva lot of fun, if nothing else. Interesting.

Link: Aerofex via The Blaze

Check out the videos below – videos have no sound: