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A Working, Winged Jetpack from Switzerland
serutan writes "A Swiss airline pilot and self-described adrenaline junkie named Yves Rossy has developed a working jet-pack and flown it more than 30 times. Actually, it's a pair of rigid carbon fiber wings strapped to his back, with two small kerosene-powered jet engines on each wing — essentially a small jet airplane using the pilot's body as the fuselage. His flights have lasted up to 6-1/2 minutes at speeds over 100mph. Rossy's website and YouTube have some pretty cool videos of him flying around over the mountains like Buzz Lightyear. He is working toward ground takeoffs and landings, but currently he jumps out of an airplane, unfolds the wings and flies until he runs out of fuel, then parachutes to the ground."
That's not flying, it's falling with style.
It isn't the flying that's the hard part, it's landing with the bones in your body intact.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Pretty damn awsome! The landing can be seen as well; he makes it look easy. The wings fold up and he simply parachutes down like its nothing. I was more shocked when I saw him simply jumping out of a plan with a giant pair of wings on his back; scary stuff.
I wish I got one of these for Christmas. Merry Christmas Slashdot!
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The biggest engineering obstacle he had to overcome was how to fit in the corkscrew.
Don't exactly remember how he landed, though.
Painfully.
Formerly GNU/Anonymous Coward. This message has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
Yeah thats much more like assisted gliding than anything else. When he can take off from a standing start, like in Nausicaa (valley of the wind), I'll be impressed. Also his landing technique seems a bit hair raising. Do you fold up the wings before or after you deploy the parachute?
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
After him, several other people published books on building small jet engines, like this one, for instance.
... Just throw yourself at the ground and miss.
I love his Swiss accent ;)
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This guy is looking for sponsors. Richard Branson should get his wallet out. A truly stunning achievement. The last shot in the video is inspiring.
Join the British National Party
If you don't speak French, I'll give a brief summary of his comments.
Basically, at the beginning he explains a bit about how it was designed. One point he made was that his reason for the foldable design of the wings was so that it would fit in the plane. The other interesting thing he said was that the design was effectively that of an airplane - with his body serving as the fuselage.
After the flight he just explains that after he jumped out of the plane he did a little half-turn to catch the wind. He also mentions that the wing unfolded nicely - and that when he kicked in the gas that he moved forward and he could tell that at that point he was flying. He said it was really cool, too. (Which I think we'll all agree is the case!)
Also - I'm not a native French speaker. I'm American but lived in Paris a couple of years - any native French speaker care to comment on the guy's accent? Is that a Swiss accent? (I'm presuming so, but I was curious to know from a native.)
Sigh. My id isn't prime. 2 2 2 2 2 3 5 313
...is my own jetpack to improve my commute!
Dear Santa,
If it's not too late, I would like to add a jetpack to my Xmas list. You can cross off the PS3 if that helps.
Thanks!
www.sjbaker.org
I wouldn't think he'd be aerydynamic enough with a sack that large hanging underneath..
The thing got up to 300 kph - 186mph - and it climbed several thousand feet. He was zipping alongside the plane in formation, you could see he was turning under full control around those jagged mountain peaks. That's definitely flying!
The problem with takeoff from the ground is that if his engines crap out on him at a couple of hundred feet, he has no time left to open his parachute and he'll be dead for sure. It makes much more sense to iron out any technical glitches with a drop from a plane so he always has time to open his chute in the event of problems. He's doing this very carefully - one baby step at a time.
The other problem with takeoff is that unless he has wheels or ski's or something, there is no way to build up enough speed for the wings to generate any lift. So he's going to have to have enough thrust to take off vertically - and according to TFA, that's something that'll have to wait for the next generation of machine.
www.sjbaker.org
...for Christmas.
Rollerblades?
I don't know about California, but just one year ago some guy in Finland strapped two jets to the ankles of his wingsuit, jumped from a hot air balloon 7000ft from the ground, and ZOOMed through the sky!
M. Rossy's contraption looks much more impressive though.
In the long run we are all dead. - John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946)
Can't wait to see it souped up with all kinds of spy stuff and weapons.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I can see the next development, to assist in landings and to support the assembly for a true takeoff from land, put a tricycle landing gear on it, than make it a bit more comfortable for the flier by giving him a seat of better support. With a seat we can fasten the controls down and dress up the wiring and cabling some. Add a windshield because you really don't like being hit by other flying creatures at 100+ mph.
Oh wait, that's called an airplane.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
are some miniature VTOL engines, would solve his takeoff and landing problems.
Jonathanjk.com
Why does the article keep mentioning Batman? He can't fly himself and uses jetpacks very rarely.
I think the problem might be on your end. I've had no trouble watching anything on YouTube, and I watched the rather lengthy B-52 bomber videos that someone just posted in this thread and they played perfectly.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Sooooo kewl. Hat's off to Rossy.
I call computer-illiteracy job security
Ice skates.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
At the end of the XIX Century a French Academic Organization (I dont remember its exact name) introduced the notion of airplane as a machine which can fly and CAN TAKE OFF ON ITS OWN (no catapult, no rails, no nothing, only the planes engines).
For example, Wrights brother contraption was not an airplane because although it could fly,it cannot take off on its on (this is the reason why many nations believe that the Wright brothers did not invent the airplane). The same with this contraption, it can fly but it cannot take off on its own, thus is not an airplane.
is to deliberately throw yourself at the ground and miss. The important part is to miss and he seems to be doing it the right way - stay far away from the ground while flying and land by chute.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
At first the videos don't seem so impressive when he's just gliding, then you see the thing with the vapor trails going straight out behind him...
I don't think the thing climbs very well because they don't show any dramatic shots of climbing. There's one shot that looks like a steep climb but that is after a power dive. Still it's pretty impressive to pull out of a dive and gain altitude using a short pair of wings strapped to your hips.
The most dramatic segment on the videos is an over the shoulder shot where you see him approaching a ridge. He's a little above it when he starts his approach, but if he's just gliding he's going to end up a greasy smear on the mountainside. He covers quite a bit of horizontal ground and it looks like he gains at least a little altitude on the approach. In any case, it shows either a great deal of faith in the jet engines or a serious death wish.
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paypal donate button! I'll donate $50 right now to see him devlop this some more.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
engines grenade 2 feet from his groin
....but...
Its not like he was in any real danger...?
Its not like he was in any real danger...!!
Spheres.
Mighty spheres.
Especially the first time!
I don't care how many plan B's they had.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
BTW why do they speak French in the movie?
Because it's faster than writing it on cards and holding it up so you can read it?
It's one of the four official languages of Switzerland.
Dont they learn English in school in Switzerland?
Probably, but English isn't one of their official languages. They don't even border an English-speaking country. Why would they speak English?
Besides, it is a funny kind of French, is the inventor French Canadian or what?
It's pretty clear he's Swiss. (They speak everything funny. Listen to them try to speak German sometime.)
This is why Dog created wings and jet engines.
Actually, it did the same for me. I wonder if it's a browser/plugin issue. I'm using an oldish version of Firefox, along with an old flash as well on XP (mainly out-of-date because I usually use the linux boot on XP, except I was playing some games today).
Chances are the parent is experiencing issues due to outdated browser/plugins rather than a problem with youtube itself.
It doesn't even take off from the ground.
First of all, I can't even begin to see a rationale for "no rails" unless you ban runways or other ground improvements as well.
Second, who cares how the French define the meaning of an *English* word? These are the same people who are up in arms over the pollution of thier language with "Big Mac" and "Le Picnic", so what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander... McDonalds keeps their fingers out of l'Academie Francais and they keep their fingers out of the OED.
Not necessarily. With a water flight and reasonably large wings, he can attempt to stall just before hitting the water. Still quite dangerous, but it's at a much lower velocity and lower altitude: airplane pilots are taught similar tricks for aircraft with ruined landing gear.
The issue came up in a discussion of a similar technology 30 years ago: these ideas are hardly new.
What we need is a device that's sorta like a flying Segway... it detects changes in stability and corrects for them. Seriously, having propultion from one's leg area seems like a pretty good way to go, as jet engine mounted anywhere else could risk serious injury. Plus, there's no way that a human could survive a horizontal, runway landing. Any individually mounted jet-pack would have to take off and land virtically. So, the closest thing I can think of is something like a flying segway that attaches to your legs and feet, and keeps you standing upright the entire time via smaller side-to-side thrusters, like a Harrier. Now, VTOL aircraft are incredibly innefficient, so I'm not sure how feasible this is.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
He says "it's like God holding you by a handle and taking you for a ride" -- Translation from a helpful Youtube commenter http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXxkWXncuo (great video)
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I thought the same thing - just watch a few more videos. There's one more where he's flying near the jump plane (or a chase plane) and he climbs from a lower altitude to over the camera plane's head. Pretty impressive stuff.
...or are you just happy to see mee?"
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
I'll wait until Virgin offers sub-orbital parachute diving. That's falling with class!
Inspired by my one and only skydiving adventure, which included a forty-five second solo freefall, I once wrote a short story (in a notebook I can't seem to find anywhere) about a guy who re-enters the atmosphere from an orbital flight and becomes a human meteorite. Obviously the person is breathing through canned oxygen, and once a certain speed has been attained through deacceleration, the heat shield is jettisoned so that the final minutes become an ultra-high-altitude skydiving experience.
I got the idea from reading about how the first cosmonauts had to eject from their capsules several thousand meters before hitting the ground. There's even a story that was broadcast on PBS's Nova in the early nineties about how two months before Yuri Gagarin, Vladimir Ilushyn, the soviet man who broke the sound barrier, passed out in outer space and was in mortal peril. Since Ilushyn was not anonymous and could not be erased from the books (http://www.lostcosmonauts.com/), he was wanted alive by the soviet authorities and was crash-landed one orbit before he could land within the USSR, thereby landing inside China, pretty banged up as he was passed out and still inside the capsule. For a time, Ilushyn was a patient in a chinese hospital, after which he became a "guest" of the People's Republic, before being swapped back to the motherland for a couple of spies.
Anyways, my points are that 1) Gagarin was not the first, and 2) what you describe in your post is very similar to what the soviets did during the first days of the space program, with nasty, embarassing and covered-up results.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
"The incredible, disturbing real-life events which are presented on this site are being uncovered for the first time outside the restricted community of 'insiders' who have, for reasons unknown, decided to protect the secrecy of the Soviet Establishment." Tin foil hat time.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=213172&cid=173 37636
nuf sed
Table-ized A.I.
Tin foil hat time.
You're right of course, the link to lostcosmonauts.com was a weak one, yet keep in mind that PBS took it seriously enough to run a show on the Ilyushin incident, which brings the ballgame to a higher level. BTW, correcting three mistakes of mine, proving that memory isn't as strong as a bit of research:
a) It's Ilyushin, not Ilushyn,
b) It was on PBS, but not on Nova, and
c) The show was run in 1999, not the early nineties.
Here's a stronger link: http://www.astronautix.com/astros/ilyushin.htm
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
Kinda, with Jet Boots and a skydiving wingsuit, says he had level flight for a good 30 seconds.
...I got nothing.
Starship Troopers (the book) actually begins with an infantryman heading to a target zone with that same procedure. They also had chutes, jetpacks, and all sorts of fun toys.
Star Trek Generations (again, the book) also has Kirk doing a similar stunt.
I, for one, hope the hobbyists never get bored, and help make some of these things we've read in stories a reality (I bet you were expecting an overlord joke with the starter, weren't you? Sorry to disappoint...)
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
>it shows either a great deal of faith in the jet engines or a serious death wish.
I disagree: it all depends at which height the jet engines stop: if high enough, even in case of problem (asymetrical deployement/propulsion for example), he should be able to get rid of his wings and open his parachute (well, I remember a similar design where the pilot could drop the wings, not sure about his design).
What killed many early wingmen is that their wings were not removable, and of course that they opened quite low..