Flying Bicycle? I Need to Change My Pants

July 22, 2013 by d2 4 Comments

When I was a kid, I regularly climbed a big flowering plum tree in front of my friend’s house, pretending it was a spaceship. I flew that tree all over the universe always landing on some new, strange, and wonderful planets.  When I landed I climbed out of the tree and hopped on my blue Schwinn Sting Ray (which was really an amalgam of a Jetsons-esque hovercraft, motorcycle, and army tank complete with a death laser). Woe to any unfriendly life forms be it Klingon, Martian, or the neighborhood curmudgeon, when I had them in my sights! I spent hours “flying” through the neighborhood blind to everything but my imagination, only coming back down to earth again when it was time for dinner. Far too soon my
childhood slipped away and the idea of a flying bike was slowly beaten
out of me by the realities of life. (I think I hear the distant sounding
the waaah-mbulance.)

Then the other day I was scrolling through online news and discovered that some Czechs just tested a prototype of an electric, flying bicycle. OMG! My inner child almost wet its pants with excitement. The prototype is heavy, weighing over 200 pounds, and hasn’t been tested outside on humans (that’s a dummy in the image), plus it needs two electric batteries attached to what are basically humongous fans. But who cares if it’s pretty much the most ridiculous-looking contraption ever?  That’s a bicycle and it hovered in the air for five minutes! Take that reality! The only thing missing is the laser.

Advertisements