Flight/Planes

Maybe we should hold off on flying cars until people can be trusted with jet packs.

Something not quite right about this story. If we take the pilot at his word, that he saw what most people would recognize as a jetpack/jetbelt, to my knowledge there is not such device anywhere that has the flight endurance to lift a man to 3K and safely return to the ground. All the jetpacks I'm familiar with have/had flight times of less than a minute. So assuming you would need the same amount of fuel to safely return to the ground as you would need to reach 3K, all in one minute, that would require a climb rate of 100 ft/sec. That's a "best case" scenario, meaning zoom climb to 3000 ft, then come down immediately with little to no safety margin. I don't believe such a unit exists.


The are other one person flying machines that can meet those performance specs (like jetsuits, jet hoverboard, and motorized parachutes), but those are very different than jetpacks. The bottom line on any such personal flying machine is how much fuel you can carry aloft and your fuel consumption rate.

 
Something not quite right about this story. If we take the pilot at his word, that he saw what most people would recognize as a jetpack/jetbelt, to my knowledge there is not such device anywhere that has the flight endurance to lift a man to 3K and safely return to the ground. All the jetpacks I'm familiar with have/had flight times of less than a minute. So assuming you would need the same amount of fuel to safely return to the ground as you would need to reach 3K, all in one minute, that would require a climb rate of 100 ft/sec. That's a "best case" scenario, meaning zoom climb to 3000 ft, then come down immediately with little to no safety margin. I don't believe such a unit exists.


The are other one person flying machines that can meet those performance specs (like jetsuits, jet hoverboard, and motorized parachutes), but those are very different than jetpacks. The bottom line on any such personal flying machine is how much fuel you can carry aloft and your fuel consumption rate.

But Duke, the guy that flew across the channel looks like a jet pack in that he’s got some apparatus hanging on his back. I don’t think this has to factually be a “jet pack” even if the pilots innocently referred to it as same.
 
But Duke, the guy that flew across the channel looks like a jet pack in that he’s got some apparatus hanging on his back. I don’t think this has to factually be a “jet pack” even if the pilots innocently referred to it as same.

Fair point.

That's a fuel tank on the back of the guy on the hoverboard. Here's what I suspect the AA pilot saw over LA, a jetsuit. From what I understand, they are air-launched, however. If that turns out to be the case here, the FAA will take a dim view of a pilot allowing what amounts to a jet powered skydiver to jump out over some of the busiest airspace in the nation.