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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."
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.
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.
Wrong jetpack. This is the one tfa talks about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyb6vnX1My0
It barely gets off the ground too though
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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.
Why, again, does this need to be something you carry on your back instead of something you step into?
Gyrocopters can be made very small, they can land almost vertically (and in a controlled manner with the engine out), the ones with pre-rotators and collective controls can take off near vertically (the ones that can only do the former need only a few hundred feet, the ones that can do neither need less than 1000 feet), they'd be a lot quieter, reasonably fuel-efficient, and less dangerous than any incarnation if this thing, which would fall like a rock on engine failure. Some of them even qualify as ultralights which means that no pilot license is needed for them.
Unless your driveway is in the sticks, you'll only be able to take off and land this thing there once. After that, the neighbors will have taken out restraining orders preventing you from operating it near them.
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 didn't follow the link because - lamentably it has to be said - i recognize 'eBGIQ7ZuuiU' as being synonymous with 'rick frickin' astley'.
is this troll ever going to go stale? it's already gettin old.
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.