Peter wanted to make a flying machine when he was a kid. He dreamed of going through the forest of Endor on a levitating speeder after seeing Return of the Jedi five times. He realized a hovering vehicle wasn't possible as a smart young nerd.
He recalls that there was no system that worked. People have been trying to make personal flying devices for decades. Jetpack physics was a nightmare. Do you want to burn your legs off by putting a tank of fuel in your body? It's not really a solution to personal mobility.
He went on to become a dotcom millionaire by building an online learning platform and the Swedish version of Mailchimp. Not gonna happen.
Technology is evolving in a funny way. While Ternstr was doing those dotcom firms, a different flying technology was emerging, one that didn't have the problems of jetpacks: drones.
When drones first went mainstream, they were just toys, wobbly and difficult to fly, with batteries that died in minutes. The quality of the parts grew as demand grew. The batteries became longer- lasting. Open-source coders wrote software that made drones self-stabilizing and thus easy to fly, because tilt sensors became cheap and high quality.
In 2012 Ternstr met up with an old friend who was building drones to carry cameras. As he watched the drones fly around while he was working on some of the shoots, Ternström wondered why not just make a really big drone, strap a seat on it, and carry a human?
He and his partner did. The Jetson ONE, a $92,000 contraption made of lightweight aluminum and carbon fiber, eight drone propellers, and scores of batteries, is the first model of an honest-to-goodness, hovering personal aircraft. In videos, he looks like that Endor speeder he dreamed of.
He tells me that flying is a profoundly ecstatic experience. The buyers are mostly from California. I'm not going to say Mark Zuckerberg, but around that circle.
The Jetson.
He is one of the first to have a flying machine for sale. Dozens of firms worldwide are making electrical vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. Their goal is to introduce vehicles and gradually improve them so that in 10 years you could zip from downtown to the airport in one vehicle. Some firms want to have their crafts fly autonomously or remotely piloted. Some models shift the propellers in flight.
People in flying vehicles were depicted in sci-fi illustrations. Chris Anderson, the COO of Kittyhawk, says that the Golden Age fliers are just big drones.
Big breakthroughs don't always come from where you think they will.
Designers at Apple crafting the phone, the wonks at OpenAI coding GPT-3, and the engineers of the electric car are some of the brilliant people we think of when we think of the biggest innovations. The result of tinkering on stuff that seems silly or toylike is innovation. The environments are low-stakes that hackers and enthusiasts can gradually improve the core technologies until they are ready to do wildly more ambitious things.
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