It might not look perfectly stable in the air just yet, but a company called Flowcopter is building the world’s first hydraulic drone that trades batteries and electric motors for pumps and gas engines delivering a range of hundreds of miles and flight times that last hours.

There’s little doubt that someday batteries and electric motors will be up to the task of powering all the vehicles we rely on: from cars to massive container ships, even planes, but the current reality is that gasoline and other fossil fuels are much higher density fuel sources than batteries and can power motors and engines much longer with considerably less weight.

So why are there no quadcopters with tiny gas motors powering the individual rotors when the skies are full of gas-powered planes crisscrossing the globe? The problem is that gas-powered engines can’t be as precisely controlled as electric motors, and being able to immediately and accurately adjust the rotation speed of each rotor on a…

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Source: gizmodo.com