No, it's not a prop from a James Bond movie. But the Edgley Optica is undeniably one strange, beautiful bird. First flown in 1979, the British-made aircraft looks like an eyeball stuck on the end of a plane. With a giant ducted fan behind the teardrop-shaped, window-filled cockpit, it still looks like the future, almost 35 years after its first flight. This week, the Optica is at the Paris Air Show, and its creator is making "one last push" to get the aircraft back into production, presumably by finding a sponsor or big buyer.
For centuries, humans have dreamed of flying. Once people figured out how to properly fly through the air in planes, folks started dreaming of flight without all that bulky airplane attached. Martin Jetpack wants to take the personal flight dream from James Bond special effects to consumer product, and they may be getting closer to that goal.
We never get tired of writing about networked, swarm-like quadrotor drones, mostly because this field - though it currently lacks a killer application - continues to advance at such a rapid pace. We've previously seen quadrotors work collectively to build structures and play the James Bond theme, and now researchers at ETH Zurich are teaching them to play catch.
