Back in March, DARPA announced that it had awarded company called Aurora Flight Sciences a contract to start test its far-out design for a VTOL craft propelled by two dozen ducted fans. Now the project is getting substantially more real and passed its first test with flying colors. This thing can really fly, a small version of it anyway.

The craft—officially named the LightningStrike—won the contract for phase two of DARPA's VTOL X-Plane program which aims to develop a vertical takeoff plane that can hit high speeds of up to 460 mph. Whipping up a wacky animation is one thing, but actually flying a model is another. This little sucker weighs 325 pounds and is a 20 percent of the scale of the final prototype to be built during the next two years, but its successful little trip seems to validate DARPA's choice.

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Viewers who watch all the way through (bless you) will notice something is missing. This test flight shows takeoff and landing, but not the part where the LightningStrike would transform mid-air for better cruising performance. V-22 Ospreys can do it, and so can a ten-prop NASA design so it is far from impossible, but it's still a tricky bit of design work the LightningStrike still has to overcome.

Like its little brother here, Aurora Flight Science's final larger prototype will also be unmanned, and while the X-Plane project does not demand that its champion be human-piloted, DARPA has said that it wouldn't wind seeing that flavor as well. For now, the mini version will have to do.

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