More info:
Ballistic parachute included as standard.
600lbs thrust - two kevlar rotors driven by purpose built 200hp V4
Plans to extend flight envelope to 60mph and 500 feet.
Jet pack soars above earth's bonds (but be careful)
By John Schwartz
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
OSHKOSH, Wisconsin: To rise off the ground wearing a jet pack is to feel the force of dreams. Very, very noisy dreams.
Glenn Martin, a New Zealander, has spent 27 of his 48 years developing what he calls the world's first practical jet pack. In advance of its formal unveiling Tuesday at EAA AirVenture, the gigantic annual air show here, he said he hoped to begin selling them next year for $100,000 each.
Robert Thompson, the director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University in New York, called it "about the coolest desire left to mankind."
"There is nothing that even comes close to the dream that the jet pack allows you to achieve," Thompson said.
For Martin, the jet pack is the culmination of a dream that began when he was a 5-year-old in Dunedin, New Zealand. For those who still remember childhood dreams of flying and comic-book visions of the 21st century, the jet pack suggests the possible fulfillment of the yearning for those long-promised gifts of technology.
Buck Rogers and James Bond used fictional jet packs, and since the 1960s several real jet pack designs have been forged from metal, plastic and propellant. None has flown more than a minute. Martin's machines can run for 30 minutes.
At first sight, parked in the back of a rented van that Martin used to cart to the air show, I admit it did not look like the classic jet packs of science fiction. It stands about five feet, or a meter and a half, and its rotors are encased in two large ducts that look a bit like cupcakes.
It rests on three legs. Martin has somehow made the future look both sleek and nerdy.
"If someone says, 'I'm not going to buy a jet pack until it's the size of my high school backpack and has a turbine engine in it,' that's fine," he said. "But they're not going to be flying a jet pack in their lifetime."
It is also not, to put it bluntly, a jet. "If you're very pedantic," Martin acknowledged, a gasoline-powered piston engine runs the large rotors.
Jet Skis, he pointed out, are not jets, and the jet stream in the atmosphere is not created by jet engines. "This thing flies on a jet of air," he said. Or, more simply, it flies.
On a couple of test runs in the yard of a home here belonging to a friend of Martin's, the jet pack jumped off the ground as if impatient to get moving, scattering a cloud of dirt and grass clippings.
With the startling power of its twin rotors and its 200-horsepower engine behind my shoulder blades, screaming like an army of leaf blowers, it felt almost as if I were doing the lifting myself, with muscles I did not know I had. It felt like living in the future - and, even better, the future we imagined back when it was something to be hoped for rather than feared.
Pressing the left-hand stick forward caused the device to pitch forward slightly, and the jet pack began advancing, a few feet above the lawn. Martin and a colleague steadied it by grasping hand rails and trotting alongside, like parents teaching a child to ride a bicycle without training wheels.
Then, coming around a curve, Martin jogged to the right to avoid some equipment on the ground, bringing the jet pack too close to an overhanging tree. The limb was sucked into the rotors with a brief but sickening sound, like a blender trying to make a margarita with twigs.
Luckily, he had spare parts and access to a workshop to replace a chipped rotor.
Martin started trying to make his jet pack dreams come true in college. While he was studying biochemistry, he was also working on painstaking calculations of thrust in the library and researching the Wright brothers' methodical approach to technology development. He later had jobs in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, but much of the money went to the work going on in his garage. He built a network of enthusiasts who helped him develop his ideas.
In June 1997, seven weeks after the birth of his second child, Martin figured his prototype was powerful enough to lift its first flier, as long as that person weighed less than 130 pounds, or 60 kilograms. So he turned to his wife. "I said, 'Hey, Vanessa, what are you doing tonight?"'
Vanessa Martin agreed to be her husband's levitating guinea pig.
Martin yoked the unit to a pole in the garage so it would lift her without moving around, put a kind of brake at the top of the pole in case the engine was stronger than he thought, and strapped her in.
She admits now that, deep down, she was not sure she would take off. At the same time, she was "very scared" of the device she calls "the beast."
The engine fired up, sounding angry, she said, and the air started blasting around her. "There's a moment when it will just bite," she said, and seem to grab the air and go. "That was it," she said. "I was totally addicted."
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."
To prove that anyone could learn to use a later prototype, Martin also enlisted his son Harrison, then 15, as a test pilot. Too young to drive, he learned to fly. The family's need for secrecy until the project could be patented and properly announced meant that Harrison could not tell his friends about it.
"I can't think of a better secret," he said, but added that it was not a hard secret to keep. "Basically, for my whole life I've had a jet pack in the garage," Harrison, now 16, said with a shrug, "so it's just one of those things you don't talk about."
With a working engine and video in hand, Martin was able to start raising enough money to quit his day job and devote himself to jet pack development full time. Before long he had venture capital financing and a PowerPoint presentation.
The current iteration of the product, the eleventh, weighs about 250 pounds and provides 600 pounds of thrust. It includes safety features like a ballistic parachute with a small explosive charge for rapid deployment in case of an emergency, like those used in some small airplanes. The pedestal that forms the main support for the device has a shock absorber like a pogo stick to soften landings. The weight of the engines and body of the flier sits lower than the rotors to create a pendulum effect that discourages the contraption from tipping upside down and creating what might be known as the lawn dart effect.
"People come up and go, 'Is it safe?"' Martin said. "Safety is a relative thing. We think we have done a lot to make this by far the safest jet pack ever built." But, he acknowledged, "it's not a high bar."
"I've got to get my head around the fact that at some point, somebody is going to have a very bad experience," he said.
So far, he said, he and his team of developers have not taken the device higher than six feet. "We set that very deliberately," he said, to ensure that they fully understand controlling the invention before taking it to more dangerous altitudes. "If you can fly it at 3 feet, you can fly it at 3,000," he said.
Only 12 people have flown the jet pack, and no one has gained more than three hours of experience in the air. He plans to take it up to 500 feet within six months. This time, he said with a smile, he will be the first.
Martin said he had no idea how his invention might ultimately be used, but he is not a man of small hopes. He repeated the story of Benjamin Franklin, on first seeing a hot-air balloon, being asked, "What good is it?" He answered, "What good is a newborn baby?"
See also:
Jetpack jumpstarts at AirVenture