Star Wars-style speeder bike tested

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A speeder bike just like those seen in Star Wars, you say? I’ll take two, and pay any price you care to name.

I would hope that, as geeks, everyone reading this will have seen the Star Wars movies at least once. The original trilogy, not the prequel trilogy, of course. Those who haven’t seen George Lucas’ opus should go do so immediately. And everyone who is left is free to get really excited over the news that someone, somewhere is succeeding at turning the speeder bike into a reality.


That someone is a company called Aerofex, and the somewhere is California. Aerofex has been developing the vehicle for some years now, but an early test in 2008 saw the contraption crashing into a tumbleweed and catching light. The brave pilot came away with burned hands, while the team decided to head back to the drawing board in order to try again.

Four years on and the test flight went a lot smoother. We know this because the company released video footage (embedded below) of what it calls the Tandem Duct Aerial Vehicle in operation in the Mojave Desert. While it’s clearly years away from production it’s mightily impressive this thing can even be maneuvered at all. And already I can see I’ll want one in the future.

Interestingly Aerofex isn’t talking these thins up as being speeder bikes from Star Wars, either now or in the future. According to Innovation Daily they’ve been conceived as unmanned vehicles, though I suspect that were they ever to become commercially available consumers and supply/demand would have the final bearing on that.

Some people are doubting the validity of the footage – understandable given the ability for anyone with even an ounce of tech-savvy to manipulate moving images in this day and age – but I believe it. And sure, there is still a lot of work to be done here, but compare footage of early test flights for planes with the reality of today and tell me it isn’t possible we’ll all be flying one of these around some day.

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