Empirical Earth · Gravity, Buoyancy & the Air

The silent aircraft with no moving parts — what MIT flew, and what it weighs

The claim

“MIT flew a silent craft with no moving parts on electric fields alone, so lift is electrical and gravity is not needed.”

What is true

The aeroplane is real and the achievement is genuine.

What is measured

In 2018 a team at MIT flew a 5 m wingspan, 2.45 kg aeroplane about 60 m across a gymnasium at roughly 11 mph, using ionized air instead of a propeller. It is a new kind of thrust on an ordinary wing. Nothing about it levitates, and nothing about it bears on the shape of the Earth.

What would show this is wrong

a solid-state craft of this kind holding station in still air with no wings and no forward speed, or producing thrust in a hard vacuum where there is no air for it to push against.

Sources

  1. Xu, H. et al. (2018). Flight of an aeroplane with solid-state propulsion. Nature 563, 532–535. The MIT electroaerodynamic aircraft: 5 m wingspan, 2.45 kg, ten flights over roughly 60 m indoo link
The full entry, with the working →

This is one card from Empirical Earth, a free reference that states each flat-Earth claim at its strongest and then answers it with sourced measurements. Nothing is for sale and there are no advertisements.