The Zapata Ezfly looks for all intents and purposes like a Segway of the sky. You stand on a small platform equipped with a series of jet thrusters, holding two handgrips that come up from the base, then rise up into the air and zoom around, steering with your bodyweight.
It builds on the platform of Franky Zapata’s Flyboard Air, a green goblin-style flying platform with no Segway-style handgrips. The Flyboard Air, like the water-propelled Flyboard that started this whole venture for Zapata, straps you in at the boots, and requires an extraordinary amount of core strength and balance to operate – which its inventor most certainly has.
Zapata has frequently been seen zooming around over waterways in Europe and the United States, testing and updating his invention, sometimes with the blessing of the authorities, sometimes without.
The new Ezfly system is a dangerously disruptive idea, because it looks for all the world like it takes very little training to operate, so just about anyone could fly one. You don’t strap your boots in, you just stand on the platform and hang onto the control sticks, pretty much like a three-dimensional Segway.
Devices like the Ezfly and Jetpack Aviation’s JB-series jetpacks are capable of flying up to 10,000 ft in the air, but they’re realistically going to spend 90 percent of their time in the death zone between 15-100 ft (4.5-30m), particularly if they become available to the public as recreational machines. So we wouldn’t expect to see this come out as a commercial product, or move into military service, until that detail has been thoroughly dealt with.
And it will be dealt with. Our feeling is that it’s only a matter of time before devices like the Ezfly become the new jet skis of the sky – unbelievably fun, massively noisy, amazing but slightly obnoxious extreme leisure machines. Bring it on.
Zapata Ezfly: The jet-powered aerial Segway anyone can fly [New Atlas]