A new challenge for Franky Zapata. Six years after crossing the channel with its Flyboard, a turbopulso table used on a body of water, the Marseille engineer is once again taking up the challenge this Friday while trying to urge the British coast with another machine: the air of the scooter.
Directed by a hybrid propulsion, this 115 kg vertical landing plane with a 2 -hour autonomy and can reach a maximum speed of 100 km/h (80 km/h on average) and an altitude of 3,000 meters.
Recreational use
The Airscooter can take a single passenger and comes in the form of a transparent ovoid bubble. “The goal is to have a 360 degree view,” said Laurent Passino, an industrial designer in Zapata in BFMTV.
The machine, only intended for recreational use, is very simple to pilot and does not require pilot license or flight certificate. Two joysticks allow it to go: the one on the left to change direction, the right to gain height.
“In an hour, anyone can take it in hand. We want to put the dream of flying that has lived in humanity for centuries, even millennia, at all,,” Franky Zapata explained to BFM Business in 2023.
Marketing in the United States
With such ambition, Franky Zapata has made his priority safety: “If there must ever be a problem for the pilot, which would do an discomfort or anything, the system can automatically activate its return to the house,” says Benoît Imbert, Zapata engineer.
This flying scooter financed by private funds aims at several markets, first that of leisure through clean sites that would be installed in tourist areas. Not in France, on the other hand, or the legislation still does not allow it.
A serial production is planned in autumn. Around 200,000 euros should be marketed, says the inventor in the Voix Du Nord. To start, it will only be marketed in the United States, where light airplanes regulations are more flexible, since it does not require certification. Franky Zapata says he wants to open “flies centers” where “people can come and come a tour of Airscooter, since we would have a ski jet or a quad.”
“We are going to offer ‘air trip’, such as road trips like those that the United States crossed in Harley, but it will be when it flies,” the inventor was still explained to BFM Business. However, he affirms that he is already working on two -point models that will be destined for him “for mobility” when used as a flying taxi.
Source: BFM TV
