Why is this all happening now? They can't all have made revolutionary breakthroughs of their own simultaneously. Is there some underlying technology that has quietly improved to the point where personal aerial dickery has become feasible?
To the best of my knowledge, this class of engines were originally developed for model aircraft.
But certainly not cheap, looking around $2,000 mark and much of that would be due to supply/demand aspect. If demand increased, that price would drop.
Coming soon to a wannabe State Level Actor's arsenal! I'm thinking Da'esh here, but could equally well be white supremacist militias or the New IRA post-Brexit, or just about anyone with a weapons R&D budget in low single-digit millions.
Just as smartphones have given us all a general purpose James Bond gadget in our pocket, so too is the availability of cheap computing elements, drone components, and tech like this going to give every militia on the planet the sort of smart weapons capability that was bleeding edge in the 1990s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u42QrTqmYwg
The description of the video contains all the numbers, including:
Max. power: 300N (30,5kg)
Fuel consumption: 980ml/min (at max power)
Price: 5295 €Some of the earlier attempts did have ballistic parachutes but you still had to deploy at least 75 feet high. Any lower and you're dead.
I'm guessing the person flying this controls this using their legs and center of gravity.
The biggest surprise? That human-powered flight has been a thing since the 60s. Second and third place, respectively, are the twins who made a bathtub fly and the drone BASE jumper. Insane!
This was less good than I was hoping. They start the guy off on a radio tower, drag him a few meters, and then he lets go.
I mean, why did the flyboard wait until 2012 to be invented? I don't know that there's a significant technical advance in it.
technically it has already been available for a long time, just at a very different price point :
https://youtu.be/uXNNc_HFodI?t=486
Like drones and private space (SpaceX/etc) it is all about cheap&powerful electronics mostly and the good economy with a lot of money available for R&D at all levels.