World News for Students of English

05-09-2014 15:00

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, of course not, but it is a hoverbike!

Thanks to a kickstarter project and a dedicated team of engineers at UK company Malloy Aeronautics, this new hoverbike could be soaring in an airspace near you.

However, this small drone is just a one-third scale version for mass production, and a full-sized one will be flown by remote and piloted by a person.

“When I got my helicopter license, I realised that the helicopter as a design has a lot of improvements that need to be made, and one of them is safety and reliability. They’re very complex machines. And my goal was to see where we could strip away the complexity and increase the safety and that’s basically where the hoverbike came from.”

The team first plan to launch the hoverbike as an unmanned aerial vehicle, before securing an aviation certification for a manned model.

The mini hoverbike can reach a top speed of 45 miles per hour (72 kph). But don’t get your hopes up just yet. It could be a few years before we see them in our skies.

Difficult words: kickstarter (kickstarter is a project which helps people with good ideas start their businesses), soar (fly), drone (unmanned aircraft), aerial (in the air), manned (a person drives it).

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