The dream of personal flight took a great leap forward last week as Jetpack Aviation unveiled its JB-9 jetpack in spectacular fashion. Lifting off from a boat, inventor and aviator David Mayman flew the powerful, agile JB-9 around the Statue of Liberty, pausing to salute and pirouette before touching back down. Running on kerosene and using two vectored jet engines, the JB-9 can reach high speeds and altitudes and offers a flight time over 10 minutes, depending on pilot weight. We spoke at length with Mayman to discover how the JB-9 works and how long it'll be before we can buy one.
Believe it or not, people have been trying to build a jetpack for nearly a hundred years now. A portable, powerful device you can strap to your back, fire up and take to the skies for true freedom in three dimensions.
Things must have looked very positive in the 1960s when Bell’s Rocketbelt made its public debut. Thats the kind of design you might remember from the 1984 Olympics opening ceremony in Los Angeles. These hydrogen peroxide rocket belts are compact, very cool to look at, and perform more or less as you’d expect a jetpack to. Unfortunately they’re also difficult to fly, the fuel is extremely pricey and it runs out so quickly that you’re limited to about 30 seconds of flight.
More recently, you’ve got the Martin Jet Pack, which offers more than 30 minutes of flight endurance, which has safety systems built in, and which you should soon be able to actually buy for a couple of hundred grand. But it’s enormous, about as portable as a piano, and you can’t strap it to your back and walk anywhere.
There’s Yves Rossy, the Swiss Rocketman who soars through the sky on a jet-powered wing at more than 300 km/h and performs all manner of incredible aerobatics. But that’s likewise a pretty big chunk of kit, it needs to be launched at speed from a plane that’s already in the air, and at the end of the day you’re about as likely to get a chance to fly one yourself as you are to visit the moon.
Then there's Troy Hartman's parafoil jetpack, which was an accidental discovery in the process of trying to build a jet wing similar to Rossy's. But it needs a strong enough breeze to lift and fill the parachute in order to get going, and it just doesn't really look the part.
All of which is a long-winded way to point out that this is a really difficult problem to solve, so when you see the video of the JB-9below, you’re looking at a significant achievement and a milestone in personal flight.
There’s Yves Rossy, the Swiss Rocketman who soars through the sky on a jet-powered wing at more than 300 km/h and performs all manner of incredible aerobatics. But that’s likewise a pretty big chunk of kit, it needs to be launched at speed from a plane that’s already in the air, and at the end of the day you’re about as likely to get a chance to fly one yourself as you are to visit the moon.
Then there's Troy Hartman's parafoil jetpack, which was an accidental discovery in the process of trying to build a jet wing similar to Rossy's. But it needs a strong enough breeze to lift and fill the parachute in order to get going, and it just doesn't really look the part.
All of which is a long-winded way to point out that this is a really difficult problem to solve, so when you see the video of the JB-9below, you’re looking at a significant achievement and a milestone in personal flight.
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