Dubai Police Officers Will Get to Scene on Hoverbikes

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

The Dubai police force has acquired new hoverbikes for its staff. The police version developed with the Russian company Hoversurf uses that company’s recently released, battery-powered Scorpion-3 model as a base.

The hoverbike can hover up to an altitude-limited five meters (16 feet), travel at a speed-limited max of 70 kilometers per hour (43 miles per hour), and run for 25 minutes on a charge.

According to autoblog.com, the police force aims to deploy the Scorpion-3 as a first-responder vehicle in hard-to-reach places, such as the middle of a traffic jam. Conveyed to a staging point, the Scorpion’s 660-pound cargo capacity could rapidly carry an officer to the scene. The hoverbike also does standard drone duty with a range of up to six kilometers.

The platform is a unique electric-powered vessel combining a motorcycle seat with quadcopter drone technology. The Scorpion is equipped with a safety system powered by state of the art flight controllers, special logical programing and passive elements with computer aided speed and altitude limiting, according to Hoversurf website.

Other countries have been interested in such technologies as well. The US Army has been working with UK firm Malloy Aeronautics on a battlefield resupply drone that Malloy sells as a passenger-capable vehicle. Airbus incubator A3 (A-Cubed) wants to get the Vahana personal flight vehicle in the air, and Daimler-backed German firm e-volo has been developing the Volocopter. Universities around the world seem even more heavily invested in the concept.