Lucidity
UFO Pilot
We had never heard of Ehang until their nearly $800,000 crowdfunding campaign to launch its Ghost quadcopter was approaching its climax. A public relations firm hired by the company reached out to us and asked us if we'd be willing to do some coverage on the project.
Always keen to keep up with the latest multirotor developments and share them with you, we said “Sure!” We used some of their media assets to piece together a video we posted to our YouTube channel. However, CES was our first opportunity to see the Ghost with our own eyes – but when we did, we found our gaze diverted almost immediately to something new: a heavy-lift hexacopter dubbed the “Skyway.”
Given the success of the Ghost, I wasn't surprised to see them working on a successor product for the professional market, but you could have knocked me over with a Blade Nano QX when company marketing representative Jessica Perez told me that the Skyway was already fully operational and available for sale at the show!
To be sure, the whole field of multirotor aircraft is moving forward with astonishing speed, but I just couldn't believe that they had managed to develop and manufacture a professional-grade aircraft, even as the first Ghosts were only starting to arrive on the doorsteps of people who had backed their Indiegogo campaign.
Jess, as she likes to be called, also told me that Ehang had succeeded in wrangling $10 million in angel investor and venture capital funding since the conclusion of their wildly successful crowdfunding effort.
“We're not going anywhere,” she told me – and I believe her.