Offering investors more insight into its pending acquisition of a French company known for its personal water craft and a potentially revolutionary personal flying hoverboard, Implant Sciences [IMSC] says Zapata Industries’ products have new applications in defense, homeland security, search and rescue, medical evacuation and more.
Implant Sciences is still doing its due diligence on the acquisition but the U.S. and French armies have both expressed interest in the flying hovercraft that Zapata is developing, Robert Liscouski, president of Implant Sciences, tells investors this month on a call to discuss more about the company they are acquiring.
Implant Sciences is best known for its explosives trace detection technology but the company says it is hoping to divest that business to help it get out of debt and because it doesn’t see a path forward for its technology as a standalone system. The company says its customers are moving toward integrated solutions and other types of detection technologies that will make it difficult to compete effectively.
Zapata makes personal watercraft, including sit down and stand up jet skis, stand-on-top hydro-flyer that allows a person to essentially fly above the water through a hose attached between the Jet Ski and the hydro-flyer. The company more recently demonstrated its Flyboard Air, a personal air jet that enables a person to fly above the ground with a vertical lift of 12-feet a second and at speeds over 100 miles per hour. The company is also developing a sit down version of its air jet and envision autonomous hovercraft that can fly medical missions.
Liscouski says the Flyboard Air, in Implant’s assessment, meets a Technical Readiness Level 7, meaning it has gone beyond proof-of-concept and has demonstrated through human flights that it meets certain mission requirements.
Implant believes that the U.S. and French armies will be early adopters of the Flyboard Air technology because they are looking for advantages on the battlefield. He says that the technology has a lot of “promise” for medical evacuation missions, particularly where helicopters may have trouble being inserted.
Liscouski also says that the sit down version of Flyboard Air has applications for the Coast Guard, Border Patrol and Law Enforcement. In rough waters the hovercraft technology would allow Coast Guardsmen to approach a ship more safely and for all these applications it permits “highly maneuverable” operations, he says.
The potential market opportunities of the flyboard technology continue to increase the more Implant delves into Zapata and its technology, Liscouski says. He also says that currently there are no competitors to Zapata’s technology here as there are no defined markets yet.