Motorcycles taking to the skies

In 1983, the third in the Star Wars series, Return of the Jedi, was released, eventually making its way to Maseru, Lesotho, where I grew up. The imagined future world included, for the first time, the 74-Z Speeder Bike, which was a type of airborne motorcycle and there’s an exhilarating scene in which Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker chase down a stormtrooper on the speeder bike.

In the 40 years since the “creation” of the speeder bike, there have been initiatives to develop a flying motorcycle from hobbyists to serious independent manufacturers.

There’s the Xturismo hoverbike developed by Japanese company Aerwins Technologies billed, in some quarters, as the “world’s first flying bike”. It made an appearance at the North American International Auto Show in 2022, available for sale at $777,000, with a smaller, electric version scheduled for release in 2025 at $50,000.

There’s American company Jetpack Aviation’s The Speeder, which is billed as “the world’s first jet-powered flying motorcycle”. They say that they will build two versions of the Recreational Speeder, an Ultralight Version (UVS) that does not need a pilot’s licence and the Experimental Version (EVS) that needs a private pilot’s licence. The other difference between the two is that there will be restrictions on the speed and how much petrol the UVS can carry.

And then there is the LMV496 Moto Volante designed by French custom motorcycle designer and builder Ludovic Lazareth, who established his Lazareth Auto-moto in 1998. The Moto Volante is built on the foundation of his four-wheel tilting motorcycle, the LM847, powered by a 4.7L Maserati V8 engine.

This one feels to me more like a flying motorcycle because, well, you can take to the skies, but you can also ride on the road. It has an electric motor to power it on the road, and four turbine engines (which require jet fuel) on the wheel hubs. The wheels fold out to the side — making it look a bit like a drone, with a motorcycle on top — and one can then take off from the spot. It’s been said that Lazareth plans to make only five of the Moto Volante.

Now, I am no Luddite and, once I got over the excitement of the 12-year little boy lurking somewhere deep inside of me, I realised that, for all the talk and development, the idea of a flying motorcycle being readily available is truly a distant reality, if at all. Look, I would love to be able to take the most direct route to, for example, Maseru from Joburg, and not have to worry about potholes, but, so far, we don’t have the best record when it comes to actually introducing all these big, cool vehicles.

Self-driving cars have been around for more than a decade — I remember being passed on the highway in San Francisco by the Google self-driving car (now called Waymo) in 2012 and they still aren’t pervasive because of a mixture of factors, including driving laws and legalities around accidents.

Plus, human beings are bad enough on the roads, imagine trying to regulate flying vehicles? And, while it must be a thrill to zip through the air, I live in Africa and I shudder at the thought of navigating the streets of different cities, each with its own peculiarities when it comes to drivers, where there are no lanes (bearing in mind that lanes are often ignored when they do exist).

That said, if I had the budget, a flying motorcycle is something I would consider getting, just to play with. It would have to come with a nice, sizeable piece of land somewhere I could fly around over.