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Practical Jetpack Available "Soon"
Ifandbut was one of several readers to point out the arrival in Oshkosh of the first practical jetpack. It was invented by a New Zealander Glenn Martin, who has been working on the idea for 27 years. He plans to sell the gizmos for somewhere in the neighborhood of $100K. While previous attempts at jetpacks have flown for at most a couple of minutes, Mr. Martin's invention can stay aloft for half an hour. Both "practical" and "jetpack" may need quotation marks, however: The device is huge and it's incredibly noisy. And, "It is also not, to put it bluntly, a jet. 'If you're very pedantic,' Mr. Martin acknowledged, a gasoline-powered piston engine runs the large rotors. Jet Skis, he pointed out, are not jets, and the atmospheric jet stream is not created by engines. 'This thing flies on a jet of air,' he said. Or, more simply, it flies."
TFS concedes this is neother "practical" nor a "jet pack", yet still trumpets the headline "Practical Jetpack Available 'Soon'"? Well, I guess all it needs is a line at the end saying, "Ha -- made you look!".
Caveat Utilitor
We've discussed this before! I mean have you watched that video? The thing barely gets off the ground!
Lucky the $100k includes a couple of guys to hold it for you!
I suspect he either needs a fly by wire computer that manages stability or a third fan. Either way I think we're a wee way off from a production model.
It looked like someone linked to The Onion.
I'm not sure if it would be any more funny had it actually been linked from The Onion.
I'd put that at cold fusion, maybe strong AI. And more in line with this, a space elevator. Jetpacks might be pretty cool, but honestly, I'd rather just take a ride up where there's no gravity and float around for a bit.
Excellent, now my mechanic will be available to get to my flying car (which is also coming "soon") no matter where it is.
You hear a voice resounding off the local buildings
" Here I come to save the day!! "
(of course it would require modulating the sound produced by the rotors to act as a giant megaphone to be heard anywhere near this thing)
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
... welcome our hearing-impaired jetpack flying overlords.
Okay, so it's not so much an android as a small two foot tall robot.
And by 'robot'.. I mean a cat wearing a cardboard box.
------------------ See! I can make my inventions sound grandiose by making things up, too!
I can see this featured in the next Weird Al video.
Didn't the myth busters try to make one and failed at it?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
In June 1997, seven weeks after the birth of his second child, Mr. Martin figured his prototype was now powerful enough to lift its first flier, so long as that person weighed less than 130 pounds. So he turned to his wife. "I said, 'Hey, Vanessa, what are you doing tonight?"
Mrs. Martin agreed to be her husband's levitating guinea pig.
She said she felt, in a way, that she had conquered it - "the taming of it, that's so exciting." It was, she said, "probably the best experience of my life."
Doesn't say a lot about being married to Mr. Martin or Mr. Martin's prowess in the sack, does it?
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
"It is also not, to put it bluntly, a jet. 'If you're very pedantic,"' Mr. Martin acknowledged, a gasoline-powered piston engine runs the large rotors. Jet Skis, he pointed out, are not jets, and the atmospheric jet stream is not created by engines.
Certainly one is permitted a bit of license in terminology. In fact, if you really get down to it, Jet Li is not actually a jet either.
The concept of a personal flying machine (e.g. Cars, Bikes, Jet Packs) is two fold at the moment.
1) Energy / Power (inc. Storage & Delivery)
2) Safety
Now I'm going to assume for the sake of this post that we could solve the second one if it was viable to do anyway.
The real kicker is really energy. We need a very rich energy source that is cheap, light, small in volume, and safe.
We can often tick two or three of those boxes but no energy source comes remotely close to hitting all four. Hydrogen for example is light, small in volume, but there are questions over safety and cost.
If we invented some kind of completely safe energy source that had the energy output approaching a nuclear reactor and weighted very little we could be in flying cars within a few years.
But frankly such dreams are far off.
Consider the total cost of a private pilot's license is about $10k, and the cost of a used Cessna 172 can be had for about $50k in great condition (which, keep in mind, can carry four people, or 2-3 people with some gear, pretty comfortably), I think that the jetpack would have a hard time selling.
I suppose that there could be some niche market for this sort of thing though...though even a well-equipped Harley costs significantly less than many cars still.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
These will be perfect for my sharks.
"Sufferin' succotash."
My neighbors can't even handle driving SUVs, but the roads are full of them (and the hell they've made of driving among them).
Turning these people into missiles with jetpacks is a great argument for prioritizing personal force field research.
--
make install -not war
They're still trying to nail down porting Duke Nukem Forever into the console-mounted Nintendo DS.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
no, I'm not talking about the test pilot but the guy who had the guts to ask her...
In June 1997, seven weeks after the birth of his second child, Mr. Martin figured his prototype was now powerful enough to lift its first flier, so long as that person weighed less than 130 pounds. So he turned to his wife. "I said, Hey, Vanessa, what are you doing tonight? "
but seriously that's quite a feat to do with an ICE, especially if you take into consideration that it needs to be balanced.
As for me personally, I think I'll hold off until they figure out how to fit a microturbine into a school-sized backpack.
How high off the ground does a vehicle need to get before it is no longer considered a hovercraft? I don't think this vehicle has ever reached that altitude. "If you can fly it as 3 feet, you can fly it at 3000 feet" is bullshit, if I understand something called "ground effect" correctly.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
To get a (hot) chick?
Yeah, but they worked in TV time, which meant they had a week before the producer got bored and told them to do something else. This guy has been working 27 years, so I wouldn't doubt he put a little more effort in over that time.
Besides, the mythbusters fail to reproduce a lot of things, even when they know before hand it's not really a myth but actual fact.
Eggs
Milk
Bread
Cat Litter
Soda
No, thanks. I'm waiting for a hybrid or electric jet pack before I buy. One has to be practical about buying a jet pack, given today's gas prices.
Yes. Couldn't lift itself off the ground, let along a 180lb pilot.
That said, they also added a lot of structural integrity (mass) before the first flight, that they possibly could have done after first flight to check the limits.
This thing looks almost exactly like something that Mythbusters built from purchased plans. They're far from being idiots, and they couldn't get the thing off the ground.
A "Jitpeck"?
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
âoeIf you can fly it at 3 feet, you can fly it at 3,000,â/quote.
Except that you're going to have different air pressure, different wind, different temperature...
Not saying it's impossible, but I really hope they don't take it directly from 6 feet up to 6000 and wonder what went wrong.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I read TFA, and they haven't taken this thing more than six feet off the ground. I'd be happy with 50, so at least I could clear most of the trees on my way to and from work...
You know what else you didnt think of? Considering the cost of a honda civic, and gas mileage, not to mention it has room for 4 comfortably, a great track record of fuel efficiency and reliability, we are forgetting the realization that you are seemingly pretty damn boring as a human.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
No, you misunderstood: You use this thing to get to and from your Cessna. The question is, can your Cessna hold an additional 250 lbs that bulky?
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
That's a little anticlimatic,
That sentence of the last paragraph sums it up nicely. Technical detail was mostly absent, however, we are informed directly from the horse's mouth that "it simply flies". Thanks for clearing that one up. Not even a video for the visually fixated. Is there no better article on this?
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
just calling it a microcopter or something and be done with it. It seems to be neither jet nor a pack in any sense of the word(s) :(
It does have landing gear and props pointed up...we used to call those things helicopters....
I suppose the real question is how do you license it/you for use ? I didn't see anything about how one would actually use it other than a toy in your own yard. Oh well 30 minutes flight time still isn't worth dragging it out to get there unless it was straight up anyway.
Although, having read the article, that may be much more simple than an actual jet-engined jetpack for the time being.
-Aly.
Looks like he succeeded where the MythBusters failed. The device looks pretty much identical to the one they built.
How long will it be before someone creates a mod for normal helicopters, that allows the pilot to be strapped to the front, with external controls?
That's really what this is.
If the engine dies, so do you.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
The existing device includes a ballistic recovery system, basically an explosive-launched parachute that you deploy when something goes wrong. The main trick with that is to be flying high enough for the parachute to deploy and float you down. It's a common thing in ultralight aircraft and probably accounts for a lot of the cost. Most ultralight fatalities occur because the failure occurred too low for the BRD to deply, or it fouled in a propeller or something.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I seen this on TV. It's real. http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/25/gen-h4-personal-helicopter-is-for-realz-and-for-sale/
I've said it before that the main problem with these devices is that there is no graceful failure mode - unless you consider "spudder, spudder, AHHHHHHHH, splat" acceptable.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The highest the inventor has ever flown is 6ft and he ruined it demoing for the reporter by sucking in tree branches..doesn't instill confidence.
With 600lb thrust and a 450lb vehicle and operator weight, the craft only has 3.2m/s2 of vertical acceleration.
If you're 14.4m (50ft) off the ground and decending in excess of 9.6m/s (21mph) you're not going to decelerate to zero before hitting.
Strange priorities. AI changes everything, while cold fusion just removes temperature requirements from a reaction.
Yes, but say you've just played a sold-out stadium show and need to make an impressive getaway...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not just that, you need a whole new set of rules/regulations and what not for anything that provides personal flight.
Flying cars need traffic laws too.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Say you have your catbrain powered big industrial mofo running smoothly, stamping out your expensive widgets. Cleaning crew comes in WITH vacuum cleaners WITH long cords being dragged around. Now guess what happens to your widget assembly line?
I'll hold out for the Infiltrator Mk. II
Why not just go for the strap-on helicopter instead of bothering with the ducted fans?
If I remember the episode correctly, the point of that particular myth wasn't so much whether they could build a working "jetpack," but specifically, if they could do so using some instructions they found on the internet which claimed a person could successfully do so with inexpensive, commonplace parts. What they found was that the instructions were too vague to serve as anything more than guidelines, and even after going over budget to get better quality parts, their machine still had an unacceptable thrust-to-weight ratio and so could not fly with a human passenger.
While they "busted" the feasibility of that particular set of plans, they didn't really attempt to rule out a jetpack altogether. With the resources for proper parts, and the time for proper testing, it's undoubtedly possible to build a working jetpack/rocketbelt/ducted fan harness thing. The issues with personal flight systems have not so much centered around possibility as practicality.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
No, you misunderstood: You use this thing to get to and from your Cessna. The question is, can your Cessna hold an additional 250 lbs that bulky?
In that case, I'll take two!
Yeah, I think a 172 could carry 250 pounds okay, though it would be noticeably slower. I have to wonder: if you're going to fly your jetpack to the airport, what's the point of having a short-range, slow aircraft? :).
I guess it's kind of like that car that turns into a boat. It's all for the girlfriends.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Because the militaries of the world will be putting in their orders to whoever is selling. Not every soldier will have one mind you, but every soldier doesn't get an Apache, M1 Tank or a Humvee either. So until I hear about the defense industry selling these, I will write them off as impractical and too expensive.
...as seen in the Simpsons.... simply strap two 1 gallon jugs of milk, mix with Mentos, and voila!
Not building one out of a Delorean!
My backpack's got jets. I'm Boba the Fett. I bounty hunt for Jabba Hutt to finance my 'Vette. I chill in deep space, a mask is over my face.
I think think of numerous minorities in my city who could benefit from the use of a JetPack. For example, anyone who can't reverse park, merge lanes etc, is given a Jetpack. Let's keep them off our roads. The best benefit comes from their 'accidents' won't affect 'our' road toll.
Both "practical" and "jetpack" may need quotation marks, however
So essentially this article should be titled: "Practical" "Jetpack" Available "Soon".
But it costs $100k, so I guess it's not really "available" to most normal people either. So it becomes: "Practical" "Jetpack" "Available" "Soon".
That's the kind of stuff I come here to read :)!
Yea, you sure wouldn't want to try inverted flight with a 250lb jet pack and 600lbs of down thrust.
Screw this - I'm waiting for the first ROCKET pack!
If this guy forgot about the jetpack requirement and built a little ducted fan powered aircraft he could actually be on to something.
I hope it has a ballistic parachute though.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This article doesn't really make it clear what time system they're using to specify "soon". Could it possibly be Valve Time (http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time)? In that case, you guys will have to wait until Duke Nukem Forever goes gold.
Are the 3 people moving him around the field in the video included in the $100K price tag, or are they sold separately?
Flying Kiwi with lasers.
He's from NZ after all.
Anyway it doesn't look very practical at all - the two guys hardly ever let go of the thing.
I loved the part when "the Beast" sucked those tree brunches. I don't know if it will ever be practical as a jet pack, but as a vertical lawnmower has possibilities... hehe.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
It occurs to me that a jetpack would make a convenient escape vehicle after robbing a bank, since police cars would soon lose you. The only problem is that you'd need some means of securing the loot, and there would be a limit to how much you could carry. Oh, and too much load might through you off balance... Presumably, future jetpacks will overcome these limitations.
http://www.jet-man.com
instead of quoting the word "Soon" they should have quoted the word "Practical"
i don't know about you... but, I don't happen to have $100,000 laying around.
"practical" in my mind is something in the $10,000 - $20,000 range.
So the jetpack costs $100. That's a great price for a "jet" pack that flies one foot off the ground at about 2 miles an hour. Wow! I wonder how much the optional steering and stability system, consisting of three guys in black polos, kahkis, and ear protection costs? I wonder what the range is? In the video is just makes it about, what, 30 feet? Is there an in-flight movie? Built in DVD player?
...with just two tiny drawbacks: A) we don't have any jet-powered rocket pants, and B) there's no such thing as jet-powered rocket pants outside the fictional serial "Robbie Rocketpants".
> Better dead than Smeg!
http://www.angryflower.com/jetpac.gif
Why bother? Just store it at ambient temperature and pressure in some kind of big bag. In fact, hydrogen's less dense than air so maybe you could get lift from the bouyancy; it's a win-win. I'm surprised that's never been tried before.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
to use one as he did in Walker Texas Ranger.
The old style peroxide jetpacks don't require fly by wire control because just like this one they have the centre of gravity BELOW the exhausts so the pilot is effectively dangling down beneath. All that would happen if he let go of the controls is that it would probably weave around a bit at random but its unlikely to go upside down or completely out of control.
Why not paint it jet black so even "If you're very pedantic" it will be a jet pack. But I think, since it runs on fans, "fanny pack" would be a better term.
Jet packs...check. Now all I need is a few chainswords and plasma pistols and I can build my assault squad.
Hasn't this guy already done it? www.jet-man.com
What's impressive is that they built something that was pretty close to working. They needed bigger fans and most likely a more powerful motor, but it was generating lift. Of course the real problem with a jetpack like this control. The plans they downloaded from the internet almost certainly neglected this, and had it by some miracle actually worked, it would have still been a deathtrap for anything more than a tethered hover.
I read the internet for the articles.
She is still with him, a guy who for decades now has been pooring every penny he earned into a boy dream. No woman would put with that kind of adolescent behavior unless the sex is very good indeed.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
They're going to design cities around them!
Then why not go for a powered paraglider? In case of engine failure it has a decent glide ratio.
It is also much more efficient. A paraglider can fly with a 20 HP engine, instead of 200!
You can get a new powered paraglider for around US$ 8000 instead of US$100K.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Jet skis operate on a Jet of water being expelled from a nozzel powered by an impeller.
I'd say they are jet propelled. Don't believe me, I'll quote you one of my Aerospace Engineering Texts.
PS i'm an aerospace engineer.
However, if this 'jet-pack' expells air through a nozzel (didn't check out the related link) then i'd say its a jet-pack. Its jet-propelled.