Cop on Dubai’s New Hoverbike Absolutely Eats It in Crash
Forget the gnarly drop—he’s lucky not to have severed a limb.
It's been repeatedly proven that we humans and our creations have enough trouble safely navigating two dimensions, let alone the three we must monitor while airborne. Our envy of birds has nevertheless driven us to take to the skies, where even the smallest mechanical malfunction can send us spiraling back down to the earth, as demonstrated in a recent video of a Dubai policeman crashing a hoverbike—hard.
Despite the best efforts of Dubai's hoverbike-riding police force to get the video removed from the internet, footage of an officer's failed test flight on a Russian-built hoverbike has begun to spread across social media. It depicts a member of the United Arab Emirates city's law enforcement taking flight on a Hoversurf S3 (basically a rideable quad-rotor drone) and reaching an altitude of about 100 feet before rapidly descending again, losing control, and impacting the ground, after which the hoverbike dangerously flips over the top of its operator.
Though the original video uploaded by Hoversurf itself has been deleted from YouTube, the one shown above from Videokings remains. Hoversurf admitted in the now-removed video's description that the crash was the result of a mechanical failure. Hoversurf's website states that the S3's maximum safe operating altitude is 16 feet and that the officer reached around 30 meters (almost 100 feet) at their highest, possibly due to the acknowledged malfunction of the vehicle's various systems. Far outside its intended scope of operation, the hoverbike became difficult to control, and its operator was extremely fortunate to escape the incident without any injuries.
"All safety systems worked well, and the pilot was not injured," stated Hoversurf. "Safety is our main concern. It is thanks to such incidents that our designs are becoming more safe."
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