I believe their is a way to have an on board aircraft laser the air in front of it and move the air out of the way, thus less friction at lower altitudes, no sonic booms and rapid acceleration no induced or parasite drag at low altitudes. You could call it hyper laser atmospheric conditioning. By doing this, the power to weight rations are no longer important and you can fly on air itself with low pressure.

Here is one possible way that it might work or how it works. You blast the crap out of the air in front of you causing a tube of non-air, a vacuum tube of non-air if you will, in the direction of intended travel.

If you intend a sharp turn using directional thrust on lets say an Aurora aircraft platform, you would have to calculate in advance where you were going. Now you do not have to worry about killing the pilot by forcing too many Gs on his body because he is now in a vacuum.

You could try to force air downward like a Harrier Jet or a hover board type skateboard by blowing low pressure while in the tube while cornering to prevent hitting the sides of the tube by blows low-pressure area under the craft or board. When you want to turn you turn the laser at an angle to blast a continuation of the tube in the intended direction of travel. Most of the super heated or blasted air exiting down compacting the sides of the tube and setting up a boundary made of think air which is now compacted and even more dense air and you use that dense air to pivot on with the low pressure area you blow underneath the craft as it banks within the tube created with the laser. You could do this in a wind tunnel, because I do not think I wish to be the first pioneer to die until the airflow disruptions are calculated and proven. After all we do know something about traveling and maneuvering in a vacuum.

To slow down you decrease the power of the laser. You might even have the propulsion system or engines on the outside of the tube and the tube only in the area of where the fuselage will be traveling. Thus you eliminate all the drag caused by the body of the craft. A person on a personal hover Craft PHC, also I am sure would prefer to travel where most of his or her body was outside the vacuum where they could breath. It would appear as if they were flying. The problem of course is the power required to power up the laser.

Wave Rider Technology exists, but perhaps we could take these aero dynamic proven airfoils and add another dimension to them and send aircraft in the atmosphere at incredible speeds and at first the engines needing oxygen could be outside the bubble tube hyper vacuum. Eventually projects such as the scram jet engines maybe adapted for flying within tube. You can then travel and turn on a dime, start and stop without killing occupants. You could travel like a flying saucer movie or those claims made by the Belgium pilots trying to intercept a UFO. You could also move energy and light within these tubes. You could send a craft, weather flows, and water flows in tubes of air to the area needed to fill up reservoirs. Well we are getting quite ahead of the technology and subject matter but with the discoveries we are making we may eventually get to a point to use some of these ideas. Now if I had groups of scientists and some non-linear thinking physicists we might make something of this idea.

Let us think for a second these technologies will work for weather control and flying without air turbulence, no speed limit, little power, you could launch the shuttle right through the atmosphere without wasting fuel, and re-entry issues until you are completely slowed to a stop and sitting on the ground and simply turn it off as the vacuum closes behind you, no friction, no problems of re-entry since you are traveling in a vacuum until you are parked. You could capture missiles fired at you using this technique, they would keep bouncing in the tube you created and then you end the tube and they hit huge pocket of air, like a Chandelier from a bridge on to water and it blows up.

This idea came from fluid dynamics and since air is a fluid, just less dense, and therefore easier to manipulate. We could use these to make funneling clouds to put out forest fires and release the water over the fire, like making the walls of a garden hose out of air then using ionic propulsion to motivate the water. Now water in a vacuum is much easier to control and it would stay together for easy transport. By moving a piece of space in the intended path we can save fuel and increase efficiency and an object in motion will continue in motion until an equal and opposite reaction, changes its flight path, speed or trajectory? A thought for you to think on.