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A person has been spotted flying above the streets of an urban area, riding atop a drone-like hoverboard in a crazy video uploaded to Twitter. Traveling at quite a surprising speed, the pilot skirts above sidewalks as they make their way through the city.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.It is currently unknown who the pilot is or what their intentions are, other than enacting revenge on Spider-Man, but it clearly demonstrates that the sci-fi gadgets of our dreams are certainly closer than we think.
In case you hadn’t guessed, what the daredevil pilot was doing is probably highly illegal, with it being against the law to fly drones in most major cities – and that’s before the drone is huge and carrying a full person. However, if you ignore the obvious danger, we can all agree it’s pretty awesome.
Insanely, the flying hoverboard could soon be available for purchase by the public, and it isn’t as expensive as you might think. The video is thought to show off the Omni Hoverboard, a patented electric flying hoverboard (no, we don’t mean a Segway with the handlebars removed) that claims to be the "first flying hoverboard". It’s hard to deny that it is everything expected of a true, Back To The Future-esque flying board, with four rotating propellers powering the craft forwards as it soars through the sky. No fixed price has been allocated yet, as Omni Hoverboards are still in development, but some suggest a price tag of between $10,000 and $20,000. For now, the company is continuously rolling out prototypes and doing demonstrations, which – although unlikely – could be an explanation of the publicly flying person.
The Omni Hoverboard made waves in the media back in 2015, after entering into the Guinness World Book of Records for breaking the longest hoverboard flight at 275.9 meters (905 feet) with their prototype. Since then, the drone market has boomed and various competitors have risen, but it is possible that this hoverboard is the current best shot at true sci-fi flight.
Watch as the Omni Hoverboard flies above a lake. Video Credit: Omni Hoverboards
This is not the first time an inexplicable flying person has entered the headlines. Back in 2020, an unidentified flying person (which technically made them a UFO) was spotted with what was believed to be a jetpack, soaring at 914 meters (3,000 feet). Pilots of aircraft that made the discovery were understandably confused – no jetpacks could reach even a fraction of that height, and well-known jetpack joyriders were accounted for. Hilariously, the story quickly unraveled, with a new video from a drone show demonstrating a drone that carried a mannequin that looked exactly like the elusive jetpacker.
