Jet Powered Human Flight

ederen writes "A skydiver outfitted with jet engines and a nylon Birdman suit jumped out of a balloon over Finland to test the idea of powered human flight without the use of an airplane. The event was sponsored in part by Bird-Man International, a company that develops and manufactures the flying-squirrel freefall suits as seen in Tomb Raider and other action movies."

Comments

Re:The video is really worth watching.

[Bitsy Boffin]

Strapping tiny jet engines to your ankles and jumping out of a balloon, that's cool and all, but let me know when they can take off under thier power!

"Hey Ma' I'm just going down the shops, you want anything?" as the engines spool up out in the backyard :)

This seems important to me

[Julian Morrison]

Yes, this was a stunt and a Rube Goldberg machine, but so was the Wright Flyer. What this has basically shown is that a wingsuit/engine combo can maintain controlled level flight with no airplane or other "exoskeleton". Could this become a new "normal" mode of flight? It strikes me as both infinitely cooler than flying cars, and far safer for third parties.

Questions worth looking into
- how to redesign a bird suit for efficient level flight
- how to increase engine burn time and optimize fuel use
- how to avoid stalls when attempting to ascend
- can a suit/engine combo be made that can take off from the ground?

Re:The video is really worth watching.

[blincoln]

Thats about the range of those early rocket belts, I think they had enough fuel for 20-30 seconds flight.

They're still limited to roughly 30 seconds, because they're so fuel-inefficient.

My understanding is that by using jet turbines, this type of propulsion should be able to be scaled up MUCH better to longer flight times. I mean, a "rocket belt" has an entire backpack full of fuel to do the 30 second flight, whereas this guy just had a couple of hot water bottles full of fuel in his flight suit.

This is really, really awesome. Even if it can't let the guy launch on his own power from the ground, it would be amazingly fun to zoom around in before popping a parachute.

Probably the only design question is how to armour the body of the flying person so that a catastrophic jet engine failure doesn't riddle them with shrapnel. One advantage of the "rocket belts" is that they don't (AFAIK) have sharp metal bits spinning at incredible speed inside.