A three-man German startup, named e-volo, scaled up their multicopter to support the weight of a human, strapped their founder into a chair at its center, and gave him the controls. The resulting flight lasted a minute and a half, and a sample of that flight can be seen in the video below. The flight characteristics were “good natured,” according to test pilot Thomas Senkel. He added that without any control input, the craft would hover in place, meaning it is very stable in the air.

It takes 16 rotors to lift up a single human pilot with very little additional weight attached. The multicopter looks like four oversized Parrot AR.Drones taped together with a chair in the middle.

The e-volo team pointed out the multicopter’s electric power as its most advanced feature. Not only is it quiet, but it features fewer moving parts and is cheap to operate. They estimate that a one-hour flight would cost 6 Euro, or a little under $10. The team also hopes to stretch out the craft’s flight time and plans for test flights of 20-30 minutes and beyond. Other power sources are also being considered, such as gas, in a bid to stretch flight time even further.

This is the first manned flight using electric multicopter technology. A couple of weeks ago, we reported that film director Peter Jackson’s cinematography crew strapped a RED cinema camera to an octocopter as a quick and cheap aerial camera, and the resulting test footage was impressive. Soon we may have cameramen in flight if this multicopter can be made to fly for an hour rather than just a few minutes.
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source: geek