This article calls it antigravity but it’s not. Two high school students built a so-called “ion-wave” aircraft that flies without aid of a motor, fan or engine. Video of the craft flying on the school website has drawn 4000 hits since it was posted a month ago. As written up in The Detroit News, “The craft was made from relatively simple materials — balsa wood, glue, foil, cotton balls and wire — and cost about $200 to construct. The aircraft is triangular shaped and gets its power from a wire that runs along the top of the device. The wire is connected to a power source, which can be anything from a battery to a desktop computer. The secret of the craft lies in a theory on the function of ion waves. The ions bump into oxygen, causing the craft to rise up, according to the students. “The electricity goes from the power supply to the wire, “jumps from the wire to the foil, which creates ion waves, then goes out from the foil into the ground,” Duncan said.” The idea isn’t new – Major Alexander de Seversky patented it and did work on the concept back in the 1960s as the Ionocraft. Get blueprints for your own Ionocraft (or lots of other wild-and-crazy devices) here.
5 thoughts on “Ion Wave Craft Flies Again!!!”
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Ion propulsion.
Pushing electrically charged air has little to do with “reacting with oxygen”. The kids should burn a little incense nearby and watch what the smoke does.
Slashdot story from March with plenty of chatter.
I hear about these things all of the time, but I’m still a little skeptical. Anyone else made one, seen one?
I think it’s incredible. If I weren’t busy with other things, I’d be building one myself. Take it over to my Physics friend in Stanford, and see what he has to say about it.
I just don’t see this thing scaling up, due to the power/weight ratio of any decently priced battery. Thus, making one of decent size couold be quite difficult. It’s possible one could send energy for it over a very long and thin wire, but it would still be difficult to scale up.
Hmm, any possibilities of this being used for noisless computer fans? Or would the electrical potential between the negative and positive parts be a bad thing for the computer?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this story and wondering what happened to the 1960s group that was working on it. Maybe they all got made part of a secret USAF program at Area 51 in Nevada to develop a BIG version of one of these and it’s responsible for some of the UFO sightings in the Southwest?
it was built by the nephew of major alexander de seversky and beat my working model x-ray machine
in the competition even though it appeared to cost
quite a bit more than we were allowed by the rules to spend on our projects.it was appr. 24″
square and did levitate for several inches!