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."

Huh?

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!".

Re:Huh?

Yeah, but "Impractical Not-Really-A-Jetpack Maybe Available Sometime" doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?

Re:Huh?

To be honest, I definitely would be interested in a story titled "Impractical Not-Really-A-Jetpack Maybe Available Sometime" - it's just too odd to pass up. Now be honest: who here wouldn't have thought "What the...?? Lemme see what's this all about."

BTW, I really like the word "pantaloons". But, I am easily amused - even "trousers" makes me smile.

Re:Huh?

It's an editing error. The original submission was "practical" "jet" "pack" "available" "soon".

Re:Huh?

I'd feel sufficiently menaced by villains flying in on those things as to call them "practical" in the super-villainy market.

Of course they'd have to come in black... and a laser beam would be a nice option.

Re:Huh?

They get around the whole 'jet' naming problem by saying that 'This thing flies on a jet of air'. Yep, and I love my home latpop computer, it's so super... so it's a supercomputer.

Needs stability control

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.

Finally, something for my Flying Car

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

I for one...

... welcome our hearing-impaired jetpack flying overlords.

My news is far more important!

I have succesfully created working artificially intelligent android!

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 Read TFA ... And Lawled

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?

Re:I Read TFA ... And Lawled

Never know, she could have joined the 3-feet high club with Mr. Martin ....

Re:I Read TFA ... And Lawled

Never know, she could have joined the 3-feet high club with Mr. Martin ....

What you mean one jetpack each? I am not sure they are designed for...in flight refueling.

Pedantry

"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.

Jet Packs & You

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.

Re:Jet Packs & You

Hydrogen for example is light, small in volume, but there are questions over safety and cost.

Actually, Hydrogen is light, huge in volume, very safe, and inexpensive. There's a reason it was used to fly blimps, you know.

And before someone goes around throwing the hindenburg in everyone's faces, keep in mind that it was painted with rocket fuel, and that more than half the people on board survived the crash. The same cannot be said for your average airplane.

What gets me though, is that in the face of a personal flying machine that flies around in a video, and is capable of doing so for half an hour, you go on about how personal flying machines aren't possible. Flying cars are known as Helicopters, and your average person could likely afford a hot air balloon. Personal flying machines are everywhere - from cessna's to hang gliders. They're just not as ubiquitous as automobiles, nor as practical for getting around.

$100k?

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 [aso.com] 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.

Re:$100k?

Are you kidding?
First, I'd love to ahve one of these, assuming it worked as promised.

Second,... ah crap, I don't know, I just want one.

Re:$100k?

Someobody that is going to buy this isn't to buy it in place of a cessna.... it's an expensive toy, albit a very expensive one.

Murderer

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.

Re:Murderer

They will only be a problem for a little while. Mistake will weed them out very quickly.
In the mean time, stay indoors.

Gasoline?!?

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.

Re:Didn't the myth busters try to make one and fai

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.

Re:Didn't the myth busters try to make one and fai

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.

Re:Jet Packs Are Still Hype!

Wrong jetpack. This is the one tfa talks about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyb6vnX1My0 [youtube.com]

It barely gets off the ground too though