Representatives of the American startup Undefined Technologies have officially announced that their silent drone with a flying saucer-like body is preparing for a full-fledged commercial launch as early as 2024 – in honor of which the team even released an exclusive video about the progress. flight tests in open areas. Of course, the technology looks very specific, so few people believe in the success of such aircraft, but the developers believe that their products will lead to serious changes in the transport market in the future. For example, flying cars may appear, and not only that.

The main feature of the Undefined Technologies drone, called Silent Ventus from other products on the market, is simply that it has no propellers. Yes, it’s hard to believe, but precisely because of the absence of the usual propellers that make up the lift, this plane makes no noise and moves silently through the air. To achieve this, the developers of Silent Ventus designed and then assembled a working prototype based on the construction of two stacked radiator grilles. These grids create a high-voltage electric field that can ionize oxygen and nitrogen molecules from the ambient air, releasing electrons and giving them a positive charge.

Then the system conditionally pushes these charges downward, creating the so-called “ion wind” – this is what creates the lift thrust. It should be noted right away that in reality this technology is nothing groundbreaking, since in fact traction based on ion installations has been used in space for a long time, and also several small objects that can levitate without additional hardware elements have been presented on Earth. The creators of Silent Ventus decided to convert all this into a larger format in order to have a large list of possibilities for further operation and scaling of the aircraft.

At the same time, it should be understood that this is a very modest flight time in the air – during testing, the Silent Ventus remained above the ground for almost five minutes, which is a very small battery life for ordinary quadcopters. But in 2020 the startup mentioned a flight time of 25 seconds, and a year later a video with a flight time of 39 seconds appeared. Two years later, the autonomy of Silent Ventus will already be five minutes – at this rate, it will reach 20-30 minutes when the company launches in 2024.