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“Look at me. Look at me. I am the jet pack pilot now.”
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If the whole purpose is to get a rope attached for commando boarding - one would think a drone is a whole lot cheaper and harder to shoot out of the air.
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Likely comes with some kind of self-inflating emergency flotation device.
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The historical alternative is no easy option…
There is a video of (I think, but can’t find) operation ‘High Jump’ in the fifties, when a captain transfers by breeches buoy to another ship, and the swell snaps the cable, sending him into the Antactic Ocean. He wa rescued in time but both ships had to stop. This is clearly better than that.
I don’t know what the pose at the end with a handgun is supposed to mean. If you were attacking a ship, they would have picked you off with a rifle a quarter of a mile out. But it is a good piece of kit for a particular job.
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Means they could conceivably land on a part of the ship where there weren’t any hostiles present and hold the position while the rest of the team ascended the boarding ladder.
Not so sure. The guy would be moving pretty fast in the air and presumably try to board when the crew was off guard or otherwise distracted. Plus there might be more than one at a time.
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The urge to salute when landing in front of the Captain must be really hard to suppress
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Well, they conveniently edit out how long it takes to remove the mittens. And it looks like it makes you pretty sluggish when trying to move around on the tarmac.
I’m gonna hazard a guess it’ll work great in search and rescue applications, but terrible in piracy or battle applications.
In context for COVID-19, I think it would be fantastic at creating social distance between you and an anti-masker.
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They’ve been trialling that as well, apparently.
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Yeah, just point at them and yell, “oi, you! Mask. Now!”
While they’re getting a jet exhaust in the face.
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At the 1:57 mark you can see the pilot just pulls his hands out in one quick motion to lean down and deploy the boarding ladder. It doesn’t appear to be a cumbersome part of the process, though he also doesn’t exactly look ready to jump into fast-paced hand-to-hand combat like Sam Wilson.
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There’s some good close-ups of the kit in the video below. Also, it gave me some appreciation of how strong the pilot needs to be, to hold the mittens in the correct attitude. I wonder if having cables attaching the mittens to the harness would take some of the strain off the wearers arms.
@Brainspore “…though he also doesn’t exactly look ready to jump into fast-paced hand-to-hand combat like Sam Wilson.”
I guess that, in very close quarters, the jets could act as a very unpleasant melee weapon.
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Both sides are planning for one in the South China Sea sometime soon
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That’s such a solid idea, I’m sure it is under development. Options to deliver smoke and gas would also be useful, I suppose.
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I thought respectable militaries weren’t gassing people anymore
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I was thinking more Tear Gas than Phosgene 
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not allowed to do that either actually
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Wow! That is surprising. I guess I’m still working on 1980’s action movie logic.
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I think a bunch of drones could deliver all sorts of nasty surprises for drug runners, pirates and the like. But then - they’d just go buy a submarine.
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This looks like a war game fantasy. A guy hovering in the air while approaching your ship would be an ideal target for a shotgun, and he has no means of defending himself while he’s in the air.
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