This New ‘Ion Drive’ Airplane Flew Straight out of Science Fiction
The quiet propulsion system has no moving parts
By Rob Verger
Hop in an airplane today, and it will get the thrust it needs to fly through the air either from a propeller or a jet engine. Both methods require moving parts — a propeller spins, and a jet engine has a fan inside. And as such, they are loud. That’s been status quo since Kitty Hawk.
But now aeronautics experts at MIT have flown a radically different type of plane that is thrust through the air using just electricity and the movement of ions, a type of silent drive without moving parts out of science fiction.
The researchers flew the airplane a total of ten times at an indoor track at MIT. It weighs a little over 5 pounds, has a wingspan of about 16 feet, and flew about 230 feet on its longest flight — roughly the twice the wingspan of a Boeing 737 — before smacking into the gym’s wall. Its speed is about 11 mph. The tech powering the plane is called electro-aerodynamic propulsion.
“What we achieved was the first ever sustained flight of an airplane that is propelled by electro-aerodynamic propulsion, and that’s also, by many definitions, the first ever solid-state flight, meaning no moving parts,” Steven Barrett, a professor of…
