Aircraft

[Haipule]

I met a retired airman who was once stationed at Edwards AB. He said he saw a small aircraft, silent without an engine or a propeller, take off and fly like any other airplane.

Impossible to say based on the lack of detail in this second hand account. Best guess is that he saw a prototype aircraft with the moving parts internalized for stealth.

My guess: they used static electricity in the form of charged plate capacitors with glass as the insulator/dielectric as a sort of engine and controlled it using electromagnetism as thrust.

That's an exceptionally bad idea. The charge needed to produce thrust or lift on those scales would overwhelm the dielectric strength of the air and you'd end up riding your own personal lightning bolt. And god help you if the dielectric on your craft failed. Falling would be the least of your worries. They'd need your DNA to identify your remains. Regardless of how you overcame all of that, assuming you could, you would have managed to produce the single least stealthy craft imaginable. The EM field you'd be pumping out would be about as sneaky as the Vegas strip.

I'm failing to see an upside to this technique. We've had better propulsion systems for over a century using nothing more complicated than an internal combustion engine and a propeller.

I like that, "Personal lightening bolt". And that's where I got started thinking about that. If electricity can open an air mass: then can I open an EM bubble using electricity? I would need lots of static electricity in the form of capacitance with a glass insulator dielectric. And enough electricity to turn the glass insulator into a capacitor. Like Benjamin Franklin said of Leyton Jars, "The electricity is in the glass".

Holes or leaks in the capacitors would be very bad and reaching the breakdown point of the dielectric would turn me into a falling rock. And yes, the amount of EMF would be outrageously dangerous!

But, if we could pull it off, we would fly invisibly because light would bend around that bubble. We would also weigh half our weight yet, not subjected to any "G-Force". There would no wind, friction or speed limit.