Workhorse Group’s SureFly personal passenger drone will take off for the first time at CES 2018 in Las Vegas on January 8. This follows the receipt of an Experimental Airworthiness Certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration.
The SureFly, which emerged at Paris Air Air Show in June last year, is a manned, personal helicopter. Early models will be pilot-operated with a joystick controller but future models will use autonomous technology.
Ahead of the debut next week, Workhorse has also announced it will spin off SureFly as its own business.
SureFly, Inc. will take over Workhorse's aerial technology, but Workhorse will still retain the assets to its HorseFly delivery drone.
This project joins the huge crowd of wannabe "jetpacks" for the masses. There's so far to go between a homebuilt platform that gets an EXPT decal and a certifiable fly-by-wire VTOL. There isn't enough skill or money at Workhorse to pull this off. Mostly it exists because the company wants to attract investors for a buyout, and in the near term they desperately need to sell shares. CEO Steve Burns comes up with a new project once every few months to try to make this little truck modification shop look like a so-called tech company.