Known online to millions as Shenqi Ayu ("Amazing Ayu"), Song grew up in rural Badong County, Hubei Province, and left school at just 14 years old to work in his father’s timber shop.
His journey to the sky was paved with literal fire. His first prototype, powered by five turbojet engines, abruptly burst into flames during a test flight.
To solve the mystery, Song fed his flight telemetry into an AI agent, which revealed that the tightly clustered engines were suffocating on their own hot exhaust. Pivoting instantly, he redesigned the craft into an electric powerhouse, equipping it with ten brushless electric motors that generated over 660 pounds of thrust.
The biggest hurdle was remaining upright on a machine with no handlebars. To survive the test flights, Song rigged an ingenious dual-phone AI coaching system: one smartphone inside the hoverboard tracked its tilt, while a second phone on his wrist processed the data and spoke real-time posture adjustments directly into his earbuds.
He spent the rest of the week conducting additional test flights over the Yangtze River and local streets, before the footage went viral online on October 15.
To me, Song's historic flight serves as a powerful reminder that groundbreaking innovation is no longer confined to billionaire tech labs or prestigious university halls.
By merging low-cost electronics with readily available AI tools, a self-taught tinkerer from rural China managed to conquer a canyon and capture the world's imagination.
While he strongly warns his followers against replicating his highly dangerous, exposed-rotor craft, Song has definitively proven that with enough imagination and perseverance, even the most far-fetched comic book fantasies can be engineered into reality.
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