Hoverboard Actually Flies To Set Guinness World Record

wwetvsports21
May 3, 2016
1 min read

Jet ski champion Franky Zapata set a new Guinness World Record with his latest creation for the farthest hoverboard flight. He has made a dozen prototypes, he had the first functional Flyboard—the water from the jet ski’s jet was powerful enough to lift a man, and he could fly around in the air, dragging the jet ski behind him, at up to 25 mph.Now he’s back with the Flyboard Air.

It’s a flying platform that represents four years of development and flies under its own power. The first video of it was released in early April, which—along with a lack of takeoff or landing shots—fueled speculation that the video was a hoax.It can hit 60 mph and can go as high as you like, as long as you’re willing to accept that it’s still a prototype and has no “Plan B” if there happens to be a problem.

“We put on little fans to control yaw,” Zapata said. “Without them, yaw is not controllable. Your brain just can’t concentrate on stabilizing the Flyboard and controlling the yaw. So we created a special algorithm so the little fans could stabilize the yaw. We worked and worked and worked over the course of a month, without flying it for real—it was all in the workshop. We made a rotating platform to test the fans under all conditions—without flying, we tried to stabilize the yaw in all possible conditions, with wind, etc. You don’t need a lot of force; the fans are tiny.”