It does carry it's own power supply and battery: "Finally Barrett used a computer model to get the most out of every design element in the aircraft, from the thruster and electrical system designs to the wires that ran through the plane. “The power converter, the battery, the caps and fuselage—everything was optimized,” Barrett says. “The simulations failed all the time. We had to make hundreds of changes.” In the end, they had the triumphant Version 2."

Here's the researchers earlier publication (2015) on the physics behind it: http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/471/2175/2014...

Edit: found some more material. No video of the actual plane yet. But the professor has a website here.

http://electricaircraft.mit.edu/research/

That said, ionization does have it's place in aircraft in terms of controlling attachment or detachment of turbulent airflow over wings. It can significantly improve fuel consumption by reducing drag.

But it is not a viable propulsion source. At least not on Earth for things larger than a meter or so.

Why would you say something like this? You sound arrogant and stupid.

You are talking about an article which says "he built the thing and flew it". And you deny that based on your balsa wood experiments?

Someone else has done you the favor of posting a video of it flying. Perhaps you'll believe that?

>But it is not a viable propulsion source. At least not on Earth for things larger than a meter or so.

It's 5m wide

see the top of page 534, figure b. You are correct that the initial forward momentum is from the launch rail, but the graph clearly shows that the ion engine provides thrust.

Is the title of the HN submission misleading? Yes.

Did the plane achieve flight with the ion engine alone? No.

Was the plane able to maintain and gain altitude because of the ion engine? Yes.

A step forward in the right direction but not as much of a breakthrough as the submission title would have you think.

>As far as I can tell it doesn't exist outside of the person's mind.

Based brah. I'm being serious when I say that I think HN needs more of this type of comment. They seem to love rigidity in comments, but not any bluntness or banter thrown in there.

Sucking almost 3A out of the battery, it's not going to fly very long, but that's also a fairly inefficient power converter design. There is lots of room for improvement.