Ever seen a model jet fly at 451 miles an hour?

I guarantee that some bureaucrat has already thought of it, or if not, will think of it as soon as they see the video, because that’s their job. They will ask themselves whether present laws cover the things, to which the answer is probably yes.

What you want to worry about is the politicians, if any of them decide that of course a high-speed drone is necessarily more dangerous than a prop-driven R/C model or a hobby rocket, and causing a scare about them is a handy step up the political hierarchy.

Mark Pauline and the folks at Survival Research Labs did a bunch of pulse jet stuff in the early 2000s

but Colin Furze’s pulse jet bicycle is my absolute fave use of the tech

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Even if I could ride a bike (I never learned), I wouldn’t get on that thing with less than a Formula 1 driver’s full flame-proof gear.

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No engine, 519 mph:

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Hey, thanks a lot. I blew 2 hours yesterday reading up on Dynamic Soaring and watching videos where I could barely see the RC gliders.

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You’re welcome; now all you need to do is learn to fly, get addicted, and start turning expensive carbon fibre gliders into wind-scattered carbon fluff!

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Civilian GPS is supposed to turn itself off above certain speeds for that reason. But that was back when GPS was expensive and rare, only made by a few companies. Surely one can get devices without that limitation these days, though I’m not going to try a search to find out…

I have a Garmin 60cx handheld GPS and I use it all the time when I’m on airplanes just to track my flight path – it always reads the groundspeed well into the 500mph+ range. Not sure if there’s an upper limit, but basic units aren’t limited too low.

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