The race to create working, practical personal jetpacks

Ideally: Travel point-to-point, rather than constrained by roads, turns, intersections, all competing with similarly-constrained traffic. Congestion en route would largely go away (although we would probably adopt "lanes" of travel analogous to what the airlines use) and would be replaced by congestion at popular destinations (again, much like the busiest hub airports).

I think a more feasible variant of this is a small platform on which the pilot would stand or sit, or from which s/he would hang, lifted and driven by the equivalent of multiple battery-powered drones.

HappySweeney2• 4 years ago

Flying around like Superman is all the reason I need.

bpicolo• 4 years ago

Fly

CodeAndCuffs• 4 years ago

The biggest utility I can see would be some already proposed with prototypes. I.e. military boarding a boat, and high angle search and rescue. We've seen tech demos for both. I have no expertise in mountain climbing or EMS, so I can't speak for how far off we are from that being practical or useful.

For things like boat boardings, it seems like it could (eventually) be the best solution to an awful situation. If bad guys with guns are on a boat and you need to get on said boat (whether to repossess the boat, or save people on the boat) boarding it is a tactical nightmare. Your options are basically:

1. Ride a small boat up to it, hope they don't see you, and climb into bad guy boat. If the bad guys did see you and start shooting you, hopefully your friends from another boat or helicopter can shoot them first.

2. Fly a noisy helicopter above said bad guy boat and fast rope down, hoping they don't shoot you or the helicopter before you get into a fighting position

3. I dont know, maybe parachute onto it? Options 1 and 2 are outside of, but adjacent to, my expertise. This is a whole other level. The military has proposed, tried, and done crazier things though.

Option 4, Jetpacks, would be nice. To be able to go from good guy boat to bad guy boat within like, 30 seconds, is still a rough approach but probably the least awful.

Fortunately, for society (unfortunately for the Jetpack industry) maritime hostage rescue is a pretty small market surface

dsomers• 4 years ago

Come on, I 100% realize that jetpacks will probably always be impractical/unsafe. Although, I think there’s a lot of allure in the same way that there is for motorcycles. I imagine you would get this sense of free flying, like a bird — it just seems fun. And if we somehow magically engineered past the energy and safety problems, you’d have mobility like a helicopter, but without needing the helicopter pad in cities. Like how scooters and motorcycles can be more convenient in cities because they’re easier to park. Dream a little, it’s fun.

BartjeD• 4 years ago

Jetpacks are unsafe when users can manipulate them and potentially crash them, or ignore safety warnings etc..

It's a lot safer if they are flown by AI. Possibly only reverting to manual control in an emergency and then only for a controlled AI assisted landing. For example.

That could prevent the scenario where terrorist with TNT strapped to his belt flies into a buildng.

On the other hand: People could still muck with the hardware and the software. Just making it more difficult doesn't rule it out.

VoodooJuJu• 4 years ago

If I had more time and money than I knew what to do with, and there are a lot of people in this class these days, I would be quite interested in obtaining a jetpack.

anta40• 4 years ago

To move from point A to point B quickly without having to face traffic jam, for example. And obviously, being able to fly is super cool.

bilsbie• 4 years ago

I’m so excited about these. I think the coolest thing would be exploring areas that are hard to hike to.

But I really want a good safety story. Maybe it needs airbags all around to turn you into a giant beach ball if something goes wrong?

Or at least a lot of redundancy.

323• 4 years ago

I think user error is a much biggest risk than technical failure.

Unless you can make the jetpack prevent you from doing stupid things, like Airbus airplanes which disallow the pilot going outside the safety envelope.

Maybe you can have a safety mode, which doesn't allow you going over 5 m height and 30 km/h speed, or something like that.

Tuna-Fish• 4 years ago

Restricting to under 5m height is much less safe than restricting to only over 10m height except at specific landing sites. I can't imagine you'd ever want that restriction.

ltbarcly32• 4 years ago

If there were a perfectly reliable, super easy to use jetpack: you would not be allowed to use it. Even if the technology were there, so are powerlines, helicopters, and other jetpack users.

Besides that, there are billions of dollars of security fences around government and other installations like power plants. I doubt they would let that be basically nullified, and would fight tooth and nail to prevent the sale of these, if they existed .

_Algernon_• 4 years ago

Except for safety issues, all those issues exist with drones, and you're still allowed to fly drones. More likely is that certain areas would be blocked / limited.

ltbarcly32• 4 years ago

It is fundementally different to have a camera above a military base and a person infiltrating it. Nobody dies when your drone hits a power line either.

toss1• 4 years ago

Less likely to prevent sale than just require adherence to FAA flight rules as already required for any other flying object, like drones. FAA both has all kinds of flight restrictions around many types of facilities, puts out all kinds of NOTAMs (Notice To Arimen) for temporary flight restrictions, and nearly anyone flying anything is required to check and follow these for every flight. Additionally, commercial drones have geofencing so they won't even fly within restricted areas.

If you fly your drone over restricted mil bases, you can expect a lot of enforcement to show up really fast, including weapons aimed at your drone. They'd have no problem enforcing the same kind of rules for a person flying over an area where deadly force is authorized for trespassers than they would for a trespasser on foot or vehicle, and you'd be a much easier target, and much larger audible signature.

I wouldn't worry that this concern will kill the industry.

wingely• 4 years ago

Ubiquitous personal jet packs would offer a level of convenience and mobility that would make it nearly impossible to keep strangers off my balcony.

washadjeffmad• 4 years ago

Not that a jetpack appeals to me at any level, but this seems like exactly the type of project that should not be developed in a race.

The race to create working, practical personal jetpacks

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