Frame from Ion drive: The first flight Plays with YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Ion drive: The first flight

Open on YouTube First HN thread

1 HN user recommended this explainer in 1 different month between 2018 and 2022.

2007–2026
1 recommendation 3 citations HackerTube score 1

Linked as a quick demonstration of the ion plane in threads about silent aircraft and flying cars.

Nature video showing MIT researchers flying the first plane with no moving parts, powered by an ion drive that creates an ionic wind from high-powered electrodes. The 5m-wide craft flies across a sports hall.

Pull quote: “if you want to see how it works and see it flying here is a YouTube link” (HN, 2022)

Also tagged: electroaerodynamic propulsion, ion drive, mit, ionic wind, silent drones, aircraft

What Hacker News said

4 labeled comments from the HN archive; up to 20 are kept per video, favoring different commenters. Each one links back to the original thread.

Citations, criticism and jokes

Cites it qqn August 2019 under Flying cars
Read the full comment
Thanks for the commentary guys, it’s been fascinating churning over all this even more. Thoughts: - Safety is the same issue as always, only it’s being ironed out faster than before. Controlled vertical landings, 3D space, and redundancy help a lot. I don’t foresee many flying high enough to get really hurt. Maybe things like undercarriage cushions or redirected waterways underneath major traffic flows could help even more. - Noise cancellation tech is already out there, as well as near-silent aircraft without moving parts: [this video] - Main arteries will be less condensed, but much more, much smaller traffic will appear and that’s going to be a new problem. The death knell for intracity public transport? - Well-made points about “actual” flying cars not actually being used. Maybe it would have been the same for cars if someone made motorized horses instead of the automobile? Thank you for all the resources. I really liked the random touchdown point, underlining how exact our tech already is. I've polished the post quite a bit, adding a lot of these extra things to it. If anyone can clarify the paper bag problem @brownbat mentioned and what @blunte meant by "s/trans/tele" I'd really appreciate it.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video in a list
Enter
Open the focused video
l
Like (on a video page)
w
Watch later (on a video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close