From the Greek myth of Icarus and the sketches of Leonardo da Vinci to the pages of science-fiction novels and big-screen superheroes, we have dreamed of finally achieving the freedom of personal flight more than we have dreamed of any other superpower.
And, surely, nothing in our collective history of this preoccupation has captured the imagination quite like the jet pack. Doubtless, in no small part, fired by Sean Connery making a rapid, yet suave, get away from the Spectre Chateau in 1965’s Thunderball, which was notably the same year as the first spacewalk by the USSR.
While rocket propulsion was for decades explored as a safety solution for drifting astronauts, the jet pack as a specific concept was originally explored by the military as a way of inserting or extracting single soldiers at targeted locations. While this potential is still tightly researched – enhanced by the latest autonomous technologies – so far it is within the international entrepreneurial community that the biggest developments have been launched to-date.
The most prominent, and advanced, being the JB programme of jet packs developed by JetPack Aviation, based in California, headed by CEO and pilot, David Mayman from Australia. It is the only company in the world to have produced a true jet pack – defined as a device that you wear on your back, that is portable so you can walk with it, and that takes-off and lands vertically.
Back in the 1960s, Bell Aerospace developed the pressurised hydrogen peroxide ‘rocket belt’, the precursor to the jet pack, which in 1962 flew for a few seconds in the Pentagon courtyard in front of President Kennedy, and is technically also what James Bond would have flown. However, this technology was only capable of delivering a 25-second flight time, not to mention being highly explosive. A decade later Williams International and Bell worked together on a turbine-powered jet pack but it was far too heavy to be practical – it could barely lift the pilot off the ground.