Electric flight - no moving parts

[robkelk]

Quirks & Quarks: A new plane with no moving parts flies by electrifying the air

MIT's Electric Aircraft  Initiative have managed to get electroaerodynamic propulsion working in the lab - 60 meters over 10 flights, with an average altitude of 0.47 meters, with no propellers or jet engines or other moving parts. There's a video of how it works on the web page, just above the link to the paper published in Nature.

EDIT: Oh, it's a YouTube vid. Here you go:




It's barely at the Kitty Hawk stage right now, if that, but it flies.


And, no doubt, the same principle is used by all those flying electromasters in superhero fiction...