At nine-thirty in the evening, one otherwise nondescript day in November 1954, a Belgian man named Roelants was riding his bicycle in the village of Dudzele, West Flanders. As he passed a dairy, he witnessed a bright light rapidly descend from the sky. As he cycled closer, the light — which he now realized was some kind of flying object — rose vertically into the sky and then, suddenly, transitioned to a horizontal flight mode and took off at high speed like a jet plane.
It is, of course, one thing to tell the world about some big potential breakthrough in air transportation. It’s another to deliver on it. The JiangSu test was a delivery — at least partially. This is the same trajectory architects followed when they began to create skyscrapers in the late 1800s, and in earnest, during the twentieth century. It’s also the same trajectory being followed today by some chip designers, who believe that the key to keeping Moore’s Law going is to use chips’ z-axis to pack in more transistors as though they were multistory buildings.
“Flying with this kind of aircraft, like Prosperity I, is also going to be [very] cost effective,” he said. “We have a simple design, and we’re using electricity, not combustion engines or complex gears or drive-trains as we have in helicopters. All of that adds up to very low operating costs, and low operating costs translate into low prices for end customers.”
Henning points to three pillars which must be completed in order for this goal to be delivered. One is the technological issue of building a fully certified, completed Prosperity I. The second is the development of the necessary ground-based infrastructure. This is the equivalent of creating a robust network of charging ports for electric cars — but, in this case, being the construction of enough takeoff and landing ports to accommodate the proposed fleet.