Yahoo Finance Man Sets Guinness World Record With Homemade Hoverboard: Video
Move over, Marty McFly. Canadian engineer Catalin Alexandru Duru has set a new world record for the furthest distance traveled on a hoverboard, and unlike McFly’s board in Back to the Future Part II, Duru’s actually works on water. He set the new record during a stunt that took place last week on Quebec’s Lake Ouareau.
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According to Guinness World Records, Duru managed to travel a distance of 905 feet and 2 inches, smashing the previous record of 164 feet. He reached a height of about 15 feet during the stunt, and as you can see in the video the hoverboard remained stable with Duru appearing in control at all times.
Duru designed and built the hoverboard himself, using two propeller-based drones fixed together. He controls the direction by shifting his weight, similar to how a Segway rider gets around. Unfortunately, a very short flight time means Duru’s hoverboard isn’t quite ready for prime time just yet.
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“I wanted to showcase that a stable flight can be achieved on a hoverboard and a human could stand and control with their feet,” Duru said after the flight.
Hoverboards have come back into the spotlight recently after American inventor Greg Henderson showed off a prototype that could get a couple of inches and above the ground and remain stable using magnetic levitation. Henderson’s board, dubbed the Hendo, requires a smooth metallic surface to work but the technology has the potential to move heavy objects, with its creator envisioning whole buildings being moved with scaled up versions of the device.
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