Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
Excellent, now my mechanic will be available to get to my flying car (which is also coming "soon") no matter where it is.
... 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!
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,
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
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.
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.
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."