Man flies new jetpack around the Statue of Liberty

uh. Icarus anyone?

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Nonsense. He must have hit a shallow reef or something.

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Well, technically, Liberty Island is in the borough of Manhattan. But actually, most of the time he was flying over what is jurisdictionally New Jersey.

Handy to get to work, but not sure about getting back. There’s nowhere to buy kerosene around there.

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Perhaps one could make an auxiliary tank supported by helium balloons.

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No, the $2.7B balloon that was supposed to be watching for that sort of thing broke it’s moorings and was last seen dry humping Ted Cruz’s leg…

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So did he actually fly around the statue, or just around the statue?

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That’s great, but why is the “Taste the Bush” lady illustrating it? Something screwed in your html?

He’s white.

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It’s impractical-seeming for casual use as transportation. For military, I can see some applications. Parachute out of a plane, then surgically place yourself in a precise location on a rooftop. Chase someone by car, then exit out of the sunroof, overtake who you’re chasing and unload a machine gun into their car. 5000 ground troops swarm in over water from ships at sea. Etc. There are uses. And some Hollywood uses.

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Awesome. The only thing that would have made this even better would have been an F-18 shooting him down.

Water doesn’t “push back” any more than air, or vacuum. Newton’s second law is all you need: the mass of the propellant multiplied by how much you accelerate it out the nozzle is equal to the upward force of the engine no matter where it is.

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No, hovering helicopters can take advantage of ground effect. Rockets can be seriously damaged by gas pressure between their engines and the ground. But a helicopter is going to get a lot more ground effect because of the large rotor disc.

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we’ve had this type of jetpack for a while, unfortunately they suffer from two major issues.

  1. difficult as hell to control
  2. inanely short flight times before they need to be refueled.

so for a lot of money you can fly very carefully with lots of training for a few minutes.

someday…someday…

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You’d think we could cleverly beef up one of those tiny camera drones* to carry a person around in the stylish inspector gadget manner, but no. Damn you, physics.

*Yeah, I just call them drones. Deal with it.

The Flying Bedstead at least had an ejector seat, and even then it was described as insanely dangerous by the likes of Neil Armstrong. This jetpack works the same way, with downwards pointing gas turbines, but no ejector seat.

It’s 2015. Don’t we all know this by now?

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Early Jetpack testing:

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Mayman prefers the term “much more manoeuvrable” than rival designs.

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