When the folks at Sikorsky announced their electric helicopter last year, I didn’t realize that they were still a ways off from getting it off the ground.
Now a fellow named Pascal Chretien has achieved the world’s first untethered, manned electric helicopter flight by following a very different strategy. Instead of modifying a tried-and-true design to use electric motors, he went with counter-rotating coaxial main rotors, eliminating the need for a “wasteful” tail rotor. Further, instead of the typical cyclic control, which tilts the main-rotor blades to direct the helicopter, he went with a simple weight-shifting system, pushed and pulled with a big set of handlebars. I’m not sure how well that’ll scale.
Anyway, this let him get a meter off the ground for a couple minutes. Batteries don’t store a lot of energy.