“For millennia,” writer Dave Eggers noted in The Guardian, “humans have dreamed of flying, and for decades they've been saying they want jetpacks. But is it really so? Look up, the skies are empty ». In fact, with the exception of planes and helicopters, private flying is still mostly science fiction. Starting with the jetpacks, the name with which the “rocket-rucksack” are identified which, thanks to a jet propulsion, allow the wearer to rise from the ground. As Eggers wrote, who in his article told what it feels like to try one: “We have jetpacks and we don't give a damn.”
Part of the reason we don't give a damn is that jetpacks, the real ones, which have been around for a few years, are for now too expensive, noisy, dangerous and cumbersome, as well as very different from what science fiction had led you to believe they could. to be.
As often happens, the first illustrations and descriptions of future rocket backpacks arrived well before technology allowed them to be made. At the end of the nineteenth century the novel The Country of the Pointed Firs talked about something similar and in the stories about jetpacks this cover of a 1928 issue of the American science fiction magazine Amazing Stories often appears.
After a few decades in which jetpacks appeared here and there in comics, cinema and television (in some cases as a ploy to make characters fly without giving the idea of wanting to emulate Superman too much), in the 1960s cases became more frequent. , and the jetpack used at the beginning of the 1965 film Agent 007 – Thunderball is well known.
From Star Wars to Minority Report, from The Adventures of Rocketeer to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, jetpacks have continued to show up, often becoming – along with flying machines and some other small flying tools – a useful visual shortcut to give the idea of something future.
Meanwhile, jetpacks had also appeared in reality. As told in the book Jetpack Dreams – dedicated to the “ups and downs (but above all lows) of a great invention that perhaps was not” – already in the early years of the twentieth century the Russian inventor Aleksandr Fyodorovich Andreyev had theorized a jetpack prototype he imagined it could have mainly military uses, for example in overcoming trenches.
In the 1960s, a more concrete prototype arrived, the Rocket Belt developed by the aerospace company Bell Aircraft, which allowed the wearer to fly for about twenty seconds. It was wearing a variation and evolution of that prototype that in 1984, at the opening ceremony of the Los Angeles Olympics, there was what is still today perhaps the most famous use case of a jetpack.
It was a remarkable moment and, as Eggers wrote, “one can understand why humanity began to believe that jetpacks were really around the corner.”
Instead, even in the almost forty years that have passed since that moment, things have not changed much. As Mashable noted, jetpacks “continue to be something that looks to be coming in a few years for many years.” Sometimes they stand out in some big event, like in 1992 at some Michael Jackson concerts (but he wasn't the one who flew) or as happened more recently before a couple of Formula 1 Grand Prix.
For some time now, jetpacks have become an excellent symbol of something that looked like the future but is not part of the present at all: there is even an entire book, dedicated to the “future that refuses to arrive” entitled Where's My Jetpack. ?.
The best current version of jetpacks is the one developed by Jetpack Aviation, a company founded in 2016 by the Australian billionaire David Mayman, who is also the most skilled pilot of the jetpacks he produces and who has happened, among other things, to fly around it. Statue of Liberty, and that on the subject of “we have jetpacks and we don't give a damn,” he told Eggers: he was jogging or strolling by the ocean, and some of them didn't even turn to look at me. The jetpack is noisy, I assure you they heard me, yet it didn't seem to matter to them “.
Eggers ended up talking to Mayman and writing an article about jetpacks because, as he recounted in the Guardian, after the age of 40 he developed a certain interest in flying, “more for the increase in free time to exploit than for a midlife crisis” . One thing led to another and Eggers then found himself in a field in Southern California, along with a couple of other people, trying on his shoulders one of the two jetpack models produced by Mayman's company, the JB10. He described it like this:
«It is a simple and beautiful object. It has two specially modified turbojet engines, a large fuel tank and two handles, the one on the right makes you accelerate and the one on the left makes you turn ». There are computer elements, sure, but most of it is a simple machine to understand. It looks just like a jetpack should have and there is no waste of space or weight. Its maximum thrust is 1700 N. The tank capacity is 43 liters. If it is empty, the jetpack weighs 37 kilograms “.
Eggers and companions underwent a briefing of a few minutes, similar to those in which you try something new for the first time, whether it is diving or sports driving, they dressed in all the necessary protections and precautions , many of which are related to avoiding burns or catches fire if something goes wrong. Regarding his personal experience, he wrote that, once you put on the backpack and the various harnesses, “it feels like before skydiving, especially in the groin area”.
To be safe, Eggers and the others flew tied to a rope, rising just over a meter off the ground. “The ignition,” he wrote, “recalls the sound of a Category 5 hurricane passing through a gutter” and that once you fly “the sensation is in no way comparable to lightness and weightlessness.” Eggers then explained: “unlike other experiences of pure flight, which exploit the wind and ride the air, with the jetpack there is only brute force”, and managing the controls “requires total physical and mental concentration”. to whom he wrote: “I would compare it to surfing big waves (which I never did anyway)”. It is particularly difficult, according to Eggers' account, to go back and forth.
As Eggers' experience suggests, jetpack flight hasn't really taken off yet because, for now, the problems are still too many. The first concerns the dangers associated with use: those resulting from having liters of kerosene in a backpack and those that would be encountered by falling or even landing badly. It is true, wrote Eggers, that “every day we fill our cars with highly flammable fuel, but there is still – or we delude ourselves there is – a comfortable distance between us and what can explode.” With jetpacks that distance isn't there, and there aren't even decades of refinements and regulations to avoid the worst.
It must also be said that so far Mayman has not found a way to integrate a parachute to the jetpack.
Moreover, as the Wall Street Journal wrote a few years ago, in most cases jetpacks fly “too low for you to be able to use a parachute in time and too high for you to survive a possible fall”.
Another problem: time. For the weight-to-power ratios needed on the fly, there is a limit to the amount of fuel you can put into the jetpack, and for now that limit means a range of around eight minutes. In the future, electric jetpacks may arrive, but for now their batteries would be too heavy and not powerful enough for flight.
In addition to being dangerous, very noisy, cumbersome to fly and unable to guarantee more than a few minutes of flight per tank, jetpacks – not just Mayman's – are also quite expensive. To date, when one thinks of their possible applications in the coming years, one thinks above all of extreme and emergency situations, which, however, it would be better not to have to do with fire, or to artistic, cinematographic or advertising contexts.
And even if, absurdly the day after tomorrow, light jetpacks should arrive, which cost like a moped and work with a battery of just a few kilos, there would remain the great problem of regulating their use, which is already difficult to do with drones, which have the relevant unlike not having a human being on board.
Yet, as Eggers points out, many of the criticisms and perplexities surrounding jetpacks are reminiscent of those about a century ago about the Wright brothers and their ideas about aviation. Meanwhile, Jetpack Aviation does not only deal with jetpacks, but also with other means for VTOL flights (with which we refer to those with vertical take-off and landing), and which are designed for a single pilot / passenger.
As for jetpacks, on the other hand, for some years now Jetpack Aviation has also been thinking of organizing competitions.
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