Official News page 10

REAL LIFE NEWS: IS THE LONG-AWAITED JETPACK FINALLY HERE?

by Hazed

I've moaned about this before. By the time we reached the 21st century we should all have been zooming around in flying cars, or wearing jetpacks, or even teleporting straight to work. But none of those things have happened. (I am just as pleased the silver jumpsuits and food pills aren't a feature of day to day life...)

We have seen jetpacks, but they are (a) very dangerous, and (b) only have enough fuel for a flight lasting a few minutes. But now there's a new jetpack being demonstrated, and this one can run for two hours. The drawback is that it only works over water.

The JetLev Flyer is actually two separate vehicles, joined together by a very large hose. On the water is a small speedboat-like vehicle, which contains a 250 horsepower motor and a pump. This is connected to a 10-meter hose, which is then attached to the jetpack, which is then attached to you. The motor pumps water from the sea or lake below, up to the nozzles on the jetpack, giving a thrust of 1,900 Newtons, enough to lift you up.

You can only go as high as the hose, obviously, but you can move at 35 mph horizontally, for up to two hours. Control is by fly-by-wire.

So it's not really practical if you want to actually go anywhere - you might as well just go on a speedboat and forget about the flying. But it sounds like such fun.

Oh, there's another catch: the cost is $100,000. So I don't see them becoming common just yet.

Watch a video of the JetLev Flyer in action here.

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