WASHINGTON—Some 115 years after the first powered flight, scientists have developed a radical new approach toward flying in the form of a small, lightweight, and virtually noiseless airplane that gets airborne with no moving parts like propellers or turbine blades.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers last week described successful flight tests at an indoor campus gymnasium of the unmanned airplane powered not by engines that burn fossils fuels but by ion wind propulsion, also called electro-aerodynamic thrust.
