SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A man wearing a jetpack soared across the Hudson River in New York City on Tuesday (Nov. 3), looping around the Statue of Liberty before landing safely on the deck of a boat.
The jetpack-wearing joyrider was David Mayman, an Australian entrepreneur who has spent the past 10 years designing and building prototypes of the wearable flying device. He's been helped in this effort by Nelson Tyler, a Hollywood-based inventor best known for developing helicopter camera systems and other movie-ready technologies, three of which have earned him Academy Awards.
Mayman and Nelson's lightweight pack, dubbed the JB-9, is small enough to fit in the trunk of a car, but it's powerful enough to rocket its wearer 10,000 feet (3,050 meters) above the ground and can hit speeds of 63 mph (102 km/h).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Monday November 09 2015, @01:34AM
These guys [martinjetpack.com] have been developing the same thing for about the same length of time.
Every now and then there's a piece on the news about how they're going to sell them in bulk to the US Navy, or Search and Rescue, or the US Army or something, but they never actually manage to to.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 09 2015, @06:32AM
The Martin jetpack is still primarily using technology from the '70s and still has the capabilities of the military prototypes from that era. This is a very different and much more capable device. Look at the videos and see the difference. Cumbersome hovering over a pad with a device that could easily crush the pilot if it tipped on landing versus strapping on a device a single person can carry around and freeform flying in the way everyone feels that jetpacks should be.