Slashdot Mirror
Man Attempts To Cross English Channel With Jet Wing
Back in May, we told you about Swiss pilot Yves Rossy and his personal jet powered wing. It seems Mr. Rossy will now try to cross the English Channel with his invention. The flight was planned for Sept. 25 but had to be canceled due to poor weather. Yves will leap from a plane more than 2,500 meters off the ground, fire up his jets and try to make the 35-kilometer flight from Calais in France to Dover in England. If all goes well, the flight will take about 12 minutes. I'd like to officially ask Mr. Rossy for a review model for Slashdot.
Transformers here to save the day!
Power. Extreme!
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
Got his cap screwed a bit too tight.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm BATMAN!
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
My wife says that I cannot have one.......
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Talk about a leap of faith!
I don't think he'll even be high enough above the ground for a parachute if everything doesn't work out!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Master chief wants one too
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
Could you explain that with a car analogy?
Has he lost his mind?
Can he see or is he blind?
Can he walk at all,
Or if he moves will he fall?
Is he alive or dead?
Has he thoughts within his head?
And if it doesn't go well? Plummeting with style does not help when you go head first into the drink, or the cliffs, at high velocity. I'd like to see him make it, just because everyone's first reaction seems to be, "He's out of his fucking mind", but I would not trade places with him for love, nor money.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
I also want one, but only after I fully digest the heavy lunch I just ate.
factor 966971: 966971
Where's the link to his site?
There's my jetpack!!!
Not mentioned in TFA, he tried to do this at Kittyhawk where the Wright brothers made their historic flight. But there was some trouble getting clearance with the US authorities....
I wonder if his helmet has a HUD with a build in MP4 for in flight movies.
His feet are right in the way of where the air blows from the get. I don't know how hot that air is, but if it is, A: he'll loose his shoes, and B:he'll burn his feet.
Why am I thinking of G.I. Joe from the 80's?
Now we just need red and blue laser guns that look like M-16's.
And maybe a ROFLCOPTOR.
Mess not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5168yjG3Qw
More likely to be a very fast hot one, really.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Landing with that gear on Fantasy Island... "the plane.. the plane... uh.. gee boss, it's so small!" :P
I REALLY don't want to see him with his gear down...
Ouch.
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man still has no depth perception.
From the looks of it he is using four JetCat P180. Each jet weighs about 5 lb and produces about 45 lb of thrust. They burn about 24 oz/minute of 1-K kerosene/Jet A1 fuel at full power.
What Ron's next endeavor be? Eating a Cathedral?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8uYhFoCFhI
With balls that big there will be too much drag.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
... is that news like that clearly demonstrate that 49% of Slashdot poters are living in a cave and 49% other are living under a bridge. What other explanation could there be for all those inane comments?
Once again: The guy has been flying this thing for quite sime time now! It flies already! And it flies well! No, his feet are not in the path of jet exhaust! Yes, he will make it more than a few feet from the ground, because he's actually taking off _from_ _a_ _plane_! And no, he'll not crash on landing, because he actually uses _a_ _parachute_ to land!
Heh. This is just like a NZ Movie;
"This is the ass end of the world. The land below you is called New Zea-land. There's the North Island - that's the good one, and the South Island, which sucks. Between these two imaginatively named islands lies a stretch of water known as the Cook Strait.
"People have swum and sailed across this straight, and thousands cross it every day by plane and ferry. But only one man has ever tried... to jump it."
From The Devil Dared Me To
Typical british bloody weather.
... what happens if he doesn't make it?
I wonder if his will has a provision- "If the bloody thing blows up and murders me, the design for it becomes creative commons- hopefully those Linux nuts can figure out why it blew up!"
Little does he know we'd just fork it into a million different versions, all similar but incompatible (and all unable to run Halo2), then Microsoft would bring out JetPackXP Professional and everyone except us would use that instead...
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
... does he have clearance to fly this route? What if they confused him for being a terrorist or being a cruise missile or something?
Buzz Lightyear called. He wants his suit back.
The game.
Why so high to start with?
He doesn't have fuel to make it across fully on it's own power i suppose.
From 2500 meters one could glide across in a variety of craft it appears. This would seem about twice the glide ratio of a small plane, doesn't sound too hard with a powered wing. Especially as it seems the wing actually does fly ok, it must be a range issue.
Heck if you let me start high enough i could fly my car across. Ok i might need oxygen and better shocks but still....
Looks like fun nonetheless, at least until i have to land with 120 lbs on my back then i'd just be a squished little geek :(
Since he only needs a L/D ratio of about 14 (35 km distance with a 2.5 km altitude start), any decent glider can do the same thing, with no thermal lifts, and no jet engines, just pure glide slope.
at least with a non-propelled wing... http://www.atairaerospace.com/press/2003/11/birdman-flies-atair-parachutes-across.html
to get a guest spot on Top Gear
Squirrel!
Yves Rossy has a long record of arerial stunts, he is definitely a pro. And he and his team have put a lot of thinking into this project.
If you think this is a stupid idea or that he'll end up in the Darwin awards hall of fame, think twice:
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/posted/archive/2008/04/25/brazil-priest-flying-party-balloons-lost-at-sea.aspx
This priest with too much faith but no brains had the brilliant idea of "flying" in a paragliding harness strapped to a lot of party balloons. The article has a nice picture.
National Geographic Channel will be having a live coverage of the event.
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/flight-of-the-jet-man-3757/Overview
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Seems like cheating as he isn't actually launching from French soil. He's just flying over the English Channel. Eh.
I'm sorry, it just looks like a Buzz Lightyear costume.
That is so freakin cool. My inner 13year old is drooling for one of our own.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
It's the marketing representative for Ryan Air.
But does Mr. Ghostrider get to do flybys of the tower even if the pattern is full?
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
Why so high to start with?
The wing has no take-off capability; it needs to be dropped from a moving airplane.The plane is simply flying above the 1200m threshold for parachute deployment. I guess, he's giving himself some head room in case things go pear-shaped. I'll go rtfa now.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If all goes well, you will be able to watch the flight broadcasted from http://jetmanlive.com/ (either click on the big "jetman live" text on the homepage and allow pop-ups or go to http://jetmanlive.com/WatchLive.aspx directly.
I'd like to officially ask Mr. Rossy for a review model for Slashdot.
Let's wait and see if it works first...
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
He reminds me of a stormtrooper.
come with yellow pants?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH7l87ktGds
A successful flight would take 12 minutes.
An unsuccessful one would take 20 seconds.
...to the site of the crash.
I'll bet he beats the paramedics there by a good twenty minutes.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
After he does this test, let's see if he can do takeoffs and landings using that contraption.
Nothing like using a human body as a fuselage, I bet... ;)
If it works, I want to see you driving across the channel in a rocket car, dammit!
~fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars~
One small step to infinity...
The mehve still looks cooler
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Besides the usual 'whatcouldpossiblygowrong' tag, I move that this merits an entirely new tag...
'WhatCouldPossiblyGoWright'
I suspect you are actually thinking of Leucothea, who persuades Odysseus to abandon his raft for something.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
He was supposed to overfly my house at the weekend for the Icarus Cup. I was all set up with a high definition video camera to get some nice shots and was very disappointed that he couldn't fly due to the high winds. He had the same problem yesterday and the flight has been delayed.
I took some film of the balloons instead.
I suspect this is all set up by 3D Realms. They obviously need to do some real life testing with the jet pack in order to fix that 11 year old bug.
35-kilometer flight from Calais in France to Dover in England. I hope he looked up Dova on Wikipedia. The White Cliffs of Dover may turn out to be a buffer If not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_cliffs_of_Dover
of Metal Gear Solid 4? It immediately made me think of Raging Raven and her lackys.
He landed safely at Dover.
It took him about 10 minutes to cross the channel, and about 2-3 more to land.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Well we have our innane comments, darwin awards, what could possibly go wrong, et all.
Wheres all the positive comments? This guy is a hero in my book. The ultimate in Nerddoom. He built his own jet powered wing and hes been flying and testing it for a long time, and now hes going to attempt something very dangerous and cool with it.
The fact that most of you are not wishing him well makes me a sad panda. Digg, is that you?
Or techincally COBRA...the CLAW I had that toy.
Though he will not meet my personal standard for a cool flying suit until he can take off and land on his own two feet. Shouts of "Up, up, and away!" are optional. I'll also allow the compromise of roller-skates if he cannot make VTOL work.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
He did it: CNN article
Now if he gets a gray suit, and puts a beak on his helmet, he could be an excellent Rodan.
Hell, buzz that sucker over Tokyo!
Keep an eye out for tanks will electric ray guns.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Sounds like an appropriate starting point for the jet wing... Perhaps with the help of Cialis, he won't have trouble keeping the wing up.
Sent from my iPhone
Yves successfully crossed the English Channel this morning in his Jet Wing, total flight time from wheels up to touchdown was 13 minutes, there is speculation that the actual crossing from Calais to Dover took less than 10 minutes, but we are awaiting final analysis for confirmation of this. Again, JetMan Yves has met with success in crossing the English Channel. Now, where do I go and get me one of these.......................
I am no longer interested in taking over the world, I just want a modest corner of the Solar System
That you are a flyboy,
I see by your outfit,
That you're a flyboy, too.
We see by our outfits,
That we are both flyboys -
Go buy an outfit:
You'll be a flyboy, too.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Hi All,
He made it. Remember that this guy is a commercial/jet fighter pilot as well as an accomlished parachutist. Children don't try this at home.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/09/26/rocket.man.english.channel.ap/index.html
....I swear I have watched this video on "Ytube" a few trillion times... I think this would be such a kick to try. I hope he makes it.
Joe Investor
Think i saw a road runner cartoon start out like this