This small V-22 Osprey lookalike looks like a sleek and sexy machine, doesn't it? The Falx Salker is a VTOL aircraft and is designed to be a hybrid electric vehicle, with solar energy augmenting the 100hp engine to achieve a fuel efficiency of 10 liters per hour of flight. According to their website, Falx Air Vehicles is "set to release its first 100% scale platform during 2008 leading to certification during the next 3 years."
It will apparently weigh in at 770 and 990 pounds for the single- and dual-seat versions, and Falx sees it having many applications, including as a police vehicle (visions of the hover cars from Bladerunner zipped through your head then didn't they?)
So why are we skeptical? Well, sure, the V-22 is a military vehicle and it's highly sophisticated—but it's been under development for over 20 years. Longer, if you include all the X-aircraft that preceded it. Two of the prototypes crashed, and two early production models crashed too. So can this small UK company really overcome the same tricky engineering obstacles faced by the V22, including that difficult transition between the hover and forward flight? We're not sure—it seems rather a lot of advanced engineering and control design. We'd love for it to be real, though. [Falx via Gizmag via Uberreview]