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The coolest “paper” airplane ever just soared to the top of our holiday gift wish list. Only it’s not really paper. It’s made from carbon fiber -- way tougher than wimpy pulp, but almost as light.
Meet the Carbon Flyer, the ultimate geeky tech toy. It’s a slick, sturdy carbon fiber video drone glider. Maybe even the app-controlled eye in the sky of your nerdiest aeronautical dreams.
Related: The Drone Industry Hates the Word 'Drone.' So, What's a Better Option?
The brains behind this featherweight flyer belong to Bret Gould and serial inventor Christopher Hawker. They both hang their hats at Hawker’s hot invention incubator Trident Design, LLC, the firm that hatched the cephalopod-inspired PowerSquid, a multi-dongle powerstrip that’s all about function over form. The Carbon Flyer smoothly combines both, but it’s all about the fun.
Fun tidbit, Trident also cooked up one of our fav food delivery devices, the Perfect Bacon Bowl. Mmm, bacon. They also created The Coolest cooler on Kickstarter. It raised a whopping record $13.3 million.
Related: It's a Bird. It's a Plane. No, It's a Flying Car (Finally)!
Hawker describes the long-range (80 yards line of sight, nearly the length of a football field) Bluetooth Carbon Flyer as “a toy to please our inner children.” Yeah, no kidding. He told TechCrunch that the iPhone and Android device-controlled gizmo uses “all of the coolest technology we could cram into it.” We’re talking high-power twin motors with differential thrust for optimal steering, a hot-swappable, USB-rechargeable 3.7-volt lithium polymer battery (to juice three-minute flights max, meh, not so awesome), bright LED night lights for nocturnal excursions, a tiny onboard camera for capturing high-res aerial video, and, well, you get the the picture.
Pre-ordering your own Carbon Flyer will put you back $99. Not bad, considering all the tech you get.
Related: This Man Used a Drone to Walk His Golden Retriever
For more Carbon Flyer tech specs than you probably need but totally want, check out the glider’s pic-packed Indiegogo campaign. Launched on November 25, it’s already glided past its $50,000 goal, raking in $80,481 so far.
To see this bad daddy take flight, check out this fun video:
Related: Yes, You Can Turn a Paper Airplane Into a Smartphone-Powered Jet
Kim Lachance Shandrow
Kim Lachance Shandrow is the former West Coast editor at Entrepreneur.com. Previously, she was a commerce columnist at Los Angeles CityBeat, a news producer at MSNBC and KNBC in Los Angeles and a frequent contributo...
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