flying lawnmower

A short clip of a jet-powered flying lawnmower, the Sky Cutter, and related RC flying lawnmowers.

A 2000 IBM commercial in which Avery Brooks complains that we still have no flying cars. It plays on the failed futurist promises of the twentieth century.

A vlog in which Tucker Gott flies a paramotor to a McDonald's for lunch, showing everyday powered paraglider flying.

Gary Garrett's stop-motion animation of his song Flying Dream, with notes arranged on a lattice of fifths and major thirds. It shows how harmony looks in just intonation, inspired by Harmonic Experience.

A short clip of a Garry Kasparov press conference interrupted by a flying object in a prank. It is a brief, crude stunt video.

Neural-network upscaled, 60 fps, stabilized and colorized version of 1902 footage of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn suspended railway in Germany. The source film comes from MoMA. It gives a vivid view of an early-1900s city and a train system that still runs.

A short Louis CK stand-up bit about complaining on airplanes, about how people take the miracle of flight for granted.

A Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch in which a job interview descends into absurdity, with Portuguese subtitles. It is a short comedy bit about nonsensical interviews.

Nature video showing MIT researchers flying the first plane with no moving parts, powered by an ion drive that creates an ionic wind from high-powered electrodes. The 5m-wide craft flies across a sports hall.

Peter Sripol shows his homemade Part 103 electric airplane flying, built from hobby brushless motors and batteries. The video covers the first flight out of ground effect.

Team BlackSheep flies FPV (first-person view) model aircraft over New York City, past the Brooklyn and Verrazano bridges, lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. The flights stirred controversy in the RC community.

A short AI-generated parody video that imagines Harry Potter as a Balenciaga fashion campaign, made with Midjourney, ChatGPT and Eleven Labs voices. It became a viral meme.

A re-upload of American Airlines captain Warren Vanderburgh's 1997 presentation warning that pilots who over-rely on cockpit automation lose manual flying skills and awareness. The uploader adds context from his own flying.

Bryan Cantrill's LISA11 talk on how illumos arose after Oracle closed OpenSolaris. It covers the history of Sun, ZFS, DTrace and Zones, and the diaspora of kernel engineers, with a famous rant about Oracle and Larry Ellison.

Wendover Productions explains why US passenger rail lags behind other countries. It covers freight companies owning most of the track, geography and population density, and the economics of competing with flying.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day undergoes hypoxia training and experiences his own impaired thinking as oxygen is withdrawn. The video shows how quickly and unnoticeably oxygen deprivation degrades judgment, illustrating why you put your own mask on first.

Veritasium's Derek Muller visits NASA JPL to see the Mars helicopter Ingenuity before it was mounted on the rover. He explains how it can fly in Mars's thin atmosphere with large, fast-spinning contra-rotating rotors and low mass, and covers power and cold.

A Wendover Productions explainer on why train tickets, especially Amtrak in the US, cost so much compared with flying. It breaks down staffing, speed and the cost components behind a ticket.

Festo's promo video of SmartBird, an ultralight bionic flying model inspired by the herring gull that flaps and twists its wings to fly. It shows the robot in flight.

A Wendover Productions explainer arguing that major airlines make much of their profit from loyalty programs and co-branded credit cards rather than flying. It frames airlines as quasi-banks that sell points in bulk, using United's pandemic-era loan as a hook.

Retired Major Brian Shul tells the story of a ground speed check with LA Center while flying the SR-71 Blackbird. He recounts it live at the Hiller Aviation Museum.

A short compilation of aircraft flying through clouds and moist air, showing the spiraling vortices that wings leave behind. The footage shows wingtip vortices and the way planes disturb cloud layers.

Spencer Lisenby explains dynamic soaring, a technique that lets unpowered radio-controlled gliders reach speeds above 835 kph. He covers the physics and the design, build and flying challenges.

AVweb's Paul Bertorelli analyzes the safety record of the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS), looking at the 90-plus deployments over 20 years of Cirrus flying. He asks whether the whole-aircraft parachute has actually saved lives.

Mick West shows new night-vision reference footage indicating the Navy's supposed flying pyramid UFO is just an out-of-focus light, likely a plane near LAX, rendered triangular by bokeh. He identifies other lights as Jupiter and stars.

A demonstration from UPenn's GRASP Lab of an autonomous quadrotor performing flips, flying through windows and perching on surfaces. It shows precise aggressive maneuvering control of a small UAV.

A short MIT Aerospace Controls Lab demo from 2011 of a variable pitch quadrotor flying.

ETH Zurich researchers demonstrate a quadrocopter that keeps flying stably after losing a motor and propeller entirely, with the algorithm running onboard while a pilot flies it.

A step-by-step guide to building a lifter, a small triangular ionocraft made from balsa wood, aluminum foil and thin wire, powered by a high-voltage supply. It also shows high-voltage safety practices.

A comedy song by the Irish duo Foil Arms and Hog about the experience of flying Ryanair, with its many upsells and indignities.

Promotional video from Zapata Racing showing Franky Zapata flying the Flyboard Air prototype, claiming autonomous flight to 10,000 feet, 150 km/h top speed and 10 minutes of endurance.

Boeing rehearses its 2015 Paris Air Show flying display of the Vietnam Airlines 787-9 Dreamliner, including a very steep takeoff and tight turns.

A short demo from the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania showing a swarm of nano quadrotors flying in coordinated formations. The vehicles were developed by KMel Robotics.

An ETH Zurich lab demonstration of a failsafe algorithm that lets a quadrocopter detect the loss of a propeller and recover, returning to its original position.

SpaceX footage of the Grasshopper reusable rocket prototype flying 325 m before landing on its pad. It was the first test to use the full navigation sensor suite and closed-loop control for a precision landing.

In a TEDGlobal talk, Raffaello D'Andrea demonstrates quadcopters that play catch, balance, learn and coordinate, using algorithms that treat them like athletes. It includes Kinect-controlled quads.