alt Hacker NewsIt sounds like it's electric powered. As much as I love brushless motors, I think a model of that scale and quality would have deserved actual jet engines.
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If it had been gas-powered motors, I would have agreed with you. The electrics sound close enough to my ear like actual jet engines though.
RC-scale tiny turbines are sort of a boondoggle. They are loud, dangerous, and quite frankly reliability disasters. Expected component lifetimes are in the hundreds of hours, most folks overhaul them every 20-50 hours of use, and they fail in the air with shocking regularity (just check youtube).
It's one of those "impressive that it works at all" kind of things. If that's what you want to see in the air, then do it. If you want to watch your one-off custom plane that represents hundreds or thousands of hours of labor fly, you push it with a fan.
AFAIK the only existing small jet engines for RC planes are much too small for this one.
Tyler Perry owns the airplane and the property. He has said that he does not fly turbines due to the fire risk in a crash. His property is surrounded by forest. If he were to cause a forest fire, the negative publicity could have a major impact on his career.