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Martin Jetpack Climbs 5000 Feet Above Sea Level
rh2600 writes "For years the Martin Jetpack has stayed just a few feet off the ground, invoking frequent suspicion about its true abilities. Well, today that all changed [video] with the first climb test in New Zealand (with weighted crash-test dummy) reaching over 5,000 feet above sea level. The emergency parachute test was also a success. Kiwis can indeed fly."
Now I can FLY!!!
Where was this thing when you needed it the most???
Nothing here... So... SHOOO!!!
A kiwi invented an airplane before the Wright Brothers. His motivation - a quicker way to get to town to the store, instead of walking it. He abandoned the project as too dangerous, when the first flight ended abruptly in a hedgerow, and he considered himself lucky to be alive.
So it can go up to 5000 ft if it uses up all its fuel getting there, and then parachutes back down? Still not totally practical.
Also they used a crash test dummy? Couldn't they find a darwin award volunterr?
Highlights @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHPedpE70Es
A jetpack should be no bigger than a hiker's backpack. This thing is more like a small aircraft.
I support metric but it's currently the standard world wide in aviation to measure altitude in feet.
Darwin is pretty far away from Christchurch. I guess they could get someone from there to volunteer, but I doubt anyone who has won some prestigious award would be into it.
Hell, Google Maps can't even figure out how to get there!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
And isn't it damn cold that high up?
Is it cold in Denver or Madrid?
The pack is big and bulky enough that the addition of a small wing won't make much of a difference. With a wing, you can transition from vertical takeoff using thrust only, to horizontal wing-borne flight which uses much less power (and/or achieves a much higher speed).
After the first twenty feet the ascension would be much easier as my bladder and bowels empty out, lightening the load...
Ken
Who keeps the Metric System down?
So to answer GP's question, the aviation industry.
This is very cool, but it looks more like a personal helicopter than a true jetpack. Certainly could get people into inaccessible areas, but with how much gear, and you couldn't bring much of anything back (like an injured hiker, etc..). Still, quite a feat of engineering. I hope he gets investors!
cheers, ben
Never miss a good chance to shut up -- Will Rogers
Never been to Madrid, but, yes, it's damn cold in Denver.
Then again, I live in Florida, so my idea of cold and your idea of cold are probably different. ;)
My blog
Despite Martin Jetpack's talk of its usefulness for remote search and rescue, the real money is for military purposes. This piece describes the first practical uses of helicopters in Korea for reconnaissance, supply, and medivac. A decade later, the next generation of choppers -- Chinooks and Hueys -- were doing serious delivery work in combat.
I, for one, welcome our new kiwi jetpack flying overlords.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
Personally, I would have performed that test quite a bit beforehand.
Maybe I can get a FEMA grant for one for Search & Rescue. Probably cheaper than a Robinson heli. (Yes, I know you can't pick up search subjects but you can't do that in a two-place Robinson either).
Everytime you jump from a building you realize that the flying is not the problem, but the landing is the thing you have to worry about.
Of course a Kiwi can fly!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdUUx5FdySs
It needs to look like a jet ski or motorcycle. There should be 4 fans, one on each corner and the user interface would be more like a motorcycle. Let go of the handles and it automatically goes into stabilized mode and your feet would control the brakes and forward acceleration. The whole thing would fit into a standard parking spot. It would have speed determined left and right tilt. In a high speed turn, the rider wants to tilt into the direction of the turn, just like a motorcycle. however, for low speed hover control the rider would lean into the direction he wants to go. Trying to nudge to the left a little to hit the parking spot, just lean to the left.
Why should the feet dangle like a pair of dead twigs. This isn't natural and it puts the operator in an uncomfortable position. No other human operated machine ignore the legs. You also loose two potential inputs for control. And lets be honest, you couldn't shoot at the enemy using this thing. But if it was a motorcycle in the air, you could still control it by leaning your body and controlling forward speed with your feet. That free's up your arms to fire.
And let's be honest, unless we get the army to buy enough of these things to lower the manufacturing cost, we'll never see one in the garage.
The more you scare people.....the more they will pay.
That's true, with some exceptions:
Gliders most commonly use the metric system. Never knew why. And then there are also all those soviet build aircraft using SI (don't know if modern Russian aircraft switched to imperial).
As for airspeed, its even weirder: Commercial aeroplanes universally use Knots, but light aircraft sometimes use mph in America, and km/h in Europe.
At 5,000 feet they can fly for nearly a mile before they have to land.
how about you start using it?
Really where is the metric whiners complaining about them using the term feet? Oh because it was a NZ newscast and a NZ citizen using them?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The basic trouble with jetpacks is that knees are terrible landing gear. You have to land vertically with a huge mass to stop, and you can't do a controlled fall like a parachute landing. Achieving altitude is not the problem. Landing is the problem.
This thing, like the Solotrek, has landing skids, which take the landing shock. But then it's not really a jetpack. It's more like the Williams X-Jet Flying Platform from the 1980s, probably the best flying machine in this category.
A prototypical jetpack like Boba Fett's would be used to hop out of or into situations which makes me :)
wonder: If you integrated a computer control system you might be able to have a small enough hydrogen peroxide jetpack
for a couple hops to and from the skiff/sail-barge. That might be a nice tool for robbing a bank or taking a bounty eh?
My favorite "jetpack" is a design from the Rifts megaverse.
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k261/ilkoderez/TitanFlyingPowerArmor.jpg
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k261/ilkoderez/titan-large.jpg
The wings on this "jetpack" would have to be variable, probably with angle of attack and dihedral-ly
for adjusting the center of gravity and kinestic control. Thrust vectoring is also a must. So that a lot of
stuff to put into a little package but I do think it is possible.
Another one of my favorites is a similar design from "Macross Frontier". In the series they actually use catapults to launch.
Dude, ask Yves Rossy, The only hard part is getting up to speed and landing.
The control surfaces on the Macross Frontier's winged jet pack are sexy; Thrust vectoring rocket engines and
fly-by-wire...
Thats my 2c,
Anonymous
They thought that the car would be a solution to many travel problems and to be fair it is but in town it is often just as slow as a horse and carriage. It was only when a minority of people had cars that there was freedom for the driver. The increasing numbers over the years has made travel in large cities a nightmare.
When you've all got jet packs and are polluting the sky above I'll be outpacing you on my horse on the ground below.
Waitaminute... a knot is an arc-minute, right? This makes sense at sea level... but does a craft traveling at 1 knot at elevation keep up with a craft traveling at 1 knot at sea level? Or, is an aeronautical knot just 1.151 miles regardless of elevation?
If cars never "took off" we wouldn't have _proper_ roads everywhere.
You can clearly see the 5000ft wire. They obviously did this in the same Hollywood studio where they faked the moon landing. My aunt's best friend's sister's cab driver knows a guy who works with a girl who dated a guy who did time with another guy who once shook hands with someone who claims to have gone to the movies with someone who claims to have worked at the company that may have supplied the raw materials to make the cable, so he obviously needs to be taken seriously; and he claims the video is a fake.
I think Faux News is investigating.
The linked video is raw: it was not edited in accordance with the US censorship requirements and was not fed through the typically mandatory US reality distortion filer. Consequently, it can case moderate to significant amounts of butthurt among the typical bumper-sticker-US-patriot types.
The Martin Jetpack will never fly (commercially) - it has too many flaws.
Firstly, it is inordinately inefficient, in an era when the focus is increasingly on conserving our fossil fuel resources.
The ducted fan units are nowhere near as efficient as the rotors of a helicopter so the Martin Jetpack burns much more fuel per hour or mile-traveled than (for unstance) the growing number of one-man helicopters.
Secondly it is a very dangerous machine with too many failure modes.
Martin have made a big deal about their use of a ballistic parachute but last night on NZ TV this parachute was demonstrated (from a height of several thousand feet). Immediately after the chute was deployed, the craft continued to plummet at least 250 feet before the canopy inflated enough to start slowing the fall. this means that anyone who has an engine failure in a Martin Jetpack at an altitude of less than about 400 feet will almost certainly be killed.
By comparison, although helicopters also have a "deadman's curve" where they are too high to survive the impact and too low to recover, the Martin Jetpack's curve is *much* larger than that of a helicopter -- mainly because a properly flown heli can translate forward speed into lift in the event of an engine failure -- the Martin Jetpack can't.
Then there's the issue of safe flight envelope. I have built an RC model of the Martin Jetpack and it is clear that the control mechanisms used (variable angle vanes in the fan efflux) provide a very limited safe/recoverable range of deviation from the hover. This is why you will never see the Martin Jetpack flying at its claimed 60mph. Once the craft achieves more than a modest speed, the forward inclination required to obtain that speed becomes greater than that which can be recovered from by vectoring the fan efflux with the vanes. What's more, the faster the craft travels, the less effective the vanes become because the airflow actually diverts much of the efflux away from those vanes.
Also, when landing, there is a critical flaw in the maneuvering system insomuch as the Martin Jetpack can't roll from side to side by lifting the low side as a helicopter can. This introduces a huge risk of tipping over on landing -- and indeed, in one of Martin's own videos this instability mode is quite apparent.
In short -- this thing is impractical, unsafe and economically doomed.
That makes me sad -- because I'm a Kiwi and always advocate for the support of good Kiwi ideas -- unfortunately, this is not one of them.
It shows very little in the way of *new* ideas and is simply another version of the ill-fated SoloTrek. If the joint efforts of NASA and private research couldn't turn the SoloTrek into a viable flying machine, what chance a lone Kiwi who's simply following the same line of thought -- complete with its many flaws and limitations?
1 knot ground speed, yes. 1 knot airspeed, no. A knot isn't an arc-minute, it's an idealized average of that number that's fixed.
Learn to love Alaska
Actually... the correct answer to the GP's question is:
We dooo, we dooo!
I think yesterday's installment of Schlock Mercenary is apropos regarding the military use of jetpacks.
-- Alastair
Ever heard of the Williams X-Jet?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_X-Jet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOVh-vlUius&feature=related
We've had the technology for nearly 30 years...
What would be cool is if they modified the "flying pulpit" so you could lean farther forward and turn more of that thrust horizontally.
Not exactly world wide.
Soliders in jetpacks are quite slow and very easy to shoot at. That's why you don't see a lot of military demand for them.
...if he adds some frickin' laser beams.
The thing just guzzles fuel for the load that it is carrying and it's not a jet. The word "jet" is marketing and fraudulent because there is no jet propulsion. It's two inefficient ducted fans that are inappropriate for hovering compared to a small helicopter rotor. This is why the thing can only fly for 30 minutes.
You can make cars that'll travel in 9 feet of horseshit. I don't think you cam make a horse do that.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.