If you grew up on a diet of Back to the Future hoverboards, The Rocketeer’s jetpack antics, and Anakin absolutely sending it on a podracer, something like this was probably inevitable: a “flying motorcycle” you can park in a normal garage and fly without a pilot’s license.
That’s the promise behind the LEO Solo JetBike, a new personal eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft) from Indiana-based LEO Flight that trades exposed rotors for 48 ducted electric microjets and just enough low-altitude freedom to make your inner 12-year-old very loud.
But under the sci-fi gloss, the Solo is actually pretty modest on paper, which is part of what makes it interesting.
It’s a Part 103 ultralight in U.S. regulatory terms: single-seat, under strict weight and speed limits, and crucially, no pilot’s license required. LEO’s target specs call for a compact 6.5×6.5-foot footprint, roughly 10–15 minutes of flight, a top speed electronically capped around 60 mph, and an altitude limited to about 15 feet off the deck. Noise is pegged at roughly 80 dB, which the company likes to compare to a vacuum cleaner rather than a helicopter, and it’s powered by a solid-state battery you can charge at home.
To keep that box of tricks in the air, the Solo uses 48 small, ducted electric fans—12 in each “corner” of the platform—rather than the bigger open rotors we’ve seen on earlier hoverbike experiments. That spreads out the thrust (better disk loading), adds redundancy, and reduces the limb-chopping risk that made some early concepts look like they were designed by Bond villains. You’re not rocketing over city skylines in this thing; you’re skimming above the ground, hovering over fields, maybe buzzing the local airstrip…in theory. Right now, the Solo is somewhere between advanced prototype and early product: you can put down a fully refundable $999 deposit, with a target base price around $99,900 and production “aimed” at late 2025, a timeline that’s already slipped once.
If that all sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before, just with different hardware. Jetson’s ONE eVTOL (a carbon cage with eight electric rotors) is already sold out for multiple production years, marketed as a “flying sports car” for about $90,000–$150,000 depending on when you got in line, with 20 minutes of flight time and a top speed in the low-60 mph range, again with no license required in some markets. Japan’s Xturismo hoverbike went the other way: a hybrid machine with a conventional engine plus four electric motors, priced around $680,000–$777,000 and pitched as a “luxury air cruiser” that can fly 30–40 minutes at about 62 mph.
And then there’s the cautionary side of the genre. Dubai’s flirtation with the Russian-built Hoversurf Scorpion hoverbike produced exactly the nightmare clip everyone expected: a police officer test-flying one of the machines, barometer fails at roughly 100 feet, the craft bucks like a mechanical bull in the sky, then pile-drives itself into the ground and flips over the rider. The pilot somehow walked away; the bike did not. That crash is a pretty stark reminder that “personal VTOL” and “casual toy” are not inherently compatible ideas—especially once you get out of ground effect and into real altitude.
That’s part of why the Solo’s numbers look so conservative. Fifteen feet isn’t exactly speeder-bike-through-the-forest material, but it keeps you in a regime where a lot of worst-case scenarios are survivable, especially with a roll-hoop frame around the rider. The 10–15 minute flight window is realistic for current battery energy density and helps keep the solid-state pack to a reasonable mass. It’s less “new way to commute” and more “compact, regulated thrill ride”...and that’s probably the right lane for this tech in its early days.
The more interesting question, at least to me, is what this signals for the future rather than whether the Solo itself becomes the next Vespa. Personal eVTOLs are the tip of a much larger spear: high-power electric propulsion, dense batteries, and increasingly clever flight control systems. You can already see the spectrum forming—Jetson’s open-rotor fun machine, Xturismo’s hybrid luxury toy, Volonaut’s Airbike concept, which claims jet-powered top speeds north of 120 mph, all nibbling at the same “strap the sky to your weekend” fantasy from different angles. Most of them will remain expensive, niche, and constrained by regulation for a long time. But the tech they prove out, safer ducted propulsion, better redundancy, smarter stability control, and lighter structures, tends to leak outward into more practical applications.
If you zoom out, this is how a lot of “ridiculous” ideas end up becoming boringly normal. Jetpacks and rocket belts were once pure Rocketeer cosplay; now we have people flying turbine packs over rivers at airshows, and militaries quietly poking at the concept for special operations work. Heads-up displays started as fighter-jet tech and ended up as HUDs in consumer cars, then in your ski goggles and motorcycle helmets. Early smartphones looked like props from mid-century sci-fi; now they’re the reason you can run a company from a coffee shop. None of that happened in a straight line. It happened because inventors kept building weird, impractical, occasionally dangerous things at the edge of what the tech could handle.
The Solo feels like one of those “edge” objects. It’s not going to replace your bike, your car, or even your ultralight any time soon. The flight time is short, the cost is high, and the use cases—for now—are mostly “joyride, content, bragging rights.” But as a proof-of-concept for compact, propeller-free electric jet propulsion and solid-state battery integration in a small airframe, it’s genuinely compelling. If LEO and its competitors can keep riders safe, regulators calm, and hardware out of the crash-compilation feeds, the lessons learned here could feed into everything from emergency response drones to air-taxis to next-generation military kit.
And that’s where the pop-culture part comes full circle. The Solo is less Anakin’s podracer and more the rough prototype that eventually, decades from now, makes Anakin’s podracer possible. It’s messy, limited, expensive, and a little ridiculous, but so were the first “horseless carriages,” the first personal computers, and the first brick-sized cell phones. Most of those early experiments didn’t scale as-is. They didn’t have to. They just had to be bold enough to exist so the rest of us could figure out what to do with the idea later.
If you want to drop a refundable grand on a flying conversation piece, LEO will happily take your name. I’m more interested in watching what survives the hype cycle: the software, the safety systems, the propulsion tricks that quietly migrate into more grounded machines. In the meantime, the Solo is a neat reminder that for all our talk about the future of mobility, there are still people in hangars and warehouses trying to build the Rocketeer fantasy into something you can actually ride. Whether that’s genius or madness depends on how you feel about strapping 48 electric microjets under your seat…and how much you trust the battery.
