Great North Air Ambulance trials paramedic jet suit
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Also, why is the BBC feeling a need to put quotes around "fly" in the article? If a person is, like, lifting off from the ground, and moving through the air in a controlled fashion driven by jet engines, isn't that pretty exactly flying, without quotes?
It depends, are they reaching a height where the Wing-in-ground effect is negligible? If they have to stay below that, then no, not really flying. Unless you'd say that a hovercraft or ekranoplan also flies.
Or they could just be staying low because it might be insanely dangerous if the operator loses control at even slight altitude.
A sub or a torpedo can fly through the water just like an airplane or a missile do through air.
If not it isn't really flying. I don't know if it moves around with forces in 6DOF or not either.
Imho no, an Ekranoplan does not fly freely. Nothing to do with a bogus DOF count though
It seems that you don't understand the implication of the DOF count. Flying means moving freely through the air. That, colloquially, means 6degree of freedom movement through space. It means looping a, it means barrel rolls, it means it can run circles and go backwards and move upside down. You know, flying.
Ekranoplans fly as much as an hovercraft does, which mean they don't. Case in point: they are unable to do 6dof movement. An ekranoplan doesn't do barrel rolls for example.
A 747 with no fuel can't take off and fly.
A 747 with so much load that it never takes off at all, can't fly.
And IMHO, a 747 with just so much load that it can barely take off but can't get out of ground effect, also can't fly. It's borderline, but not really.
It's an academic distinction though. Give the 747 a while, and it will burn enough fuel to lighten and ascend.
The wing-in-ground effect. It’s a dumb little joke.
The BBC is fastidious about quoting. It's a good thing. They don't report that 'man killed by a speeding car' - instead they report 'man "killed by a speeding car"' because they're quoting their source that told them what happened, not telling you what happened themselves because they weren't there and don't know that.
As a pilot of a helicopter whose purpose is search and rescue, this system seems a bit cumbersome. Yes, a helicopter can't land in all terrain types, but it is a pretty well established skill set to have medics lowered to survivors, and to have the capability to hoist and then transport survivors to higher level care. Maintaining this capability is expensive, which is why it is usually limited to public safety organizations, though some operators like Air Zermatt are private. While a jetpack medic might be able to compete with a subset up the capabilities of a hoist capable medevac helicopter, it won't have the range, speed, or full spectrum of services. If you end up needing a helicopter to evacuate the person anyways, you probably didn't gain a whole lot by having a jetpack medic fly out there first. Unless the jetpack bases are highly concentrated and very common in an area, they probably won't have a time advantage when it comes to onscene arrival either.
I'm not so sure I buy this. Maybe if you compare a jetpack with a helicopter capable of winching out the patient. But small 2 person helicopters are available new for the low 100s of thousands. I suspect they're more fuel efficient than a jet pack, but I don't have anything to back that up.
I don't know the economics to search/rescue problems all that well, but I've always understood that the budget is essentially never enough. With such strained budgets, does it make sense to have something so niche and expensive? It's not like these things are going to be maintenance, license and cert free if implemented to a life saving capacity.
Operations costs on a rescue helicopter can be $1500 - $5000/hr based on publicly available data. What is more, large helicopters can do harm with their down wash. So if you can have a suit, or two, or three sitting in the closet on standby then the cost to respond quickly to one of these events can be much lower than the cost of calling in a helicopter.
Clearly the amount of gear you can carry to the scene is minimal, but you can get an able bodied first aid technician there faster than hiking in and faster than calling in a helicopter, loading up the tech, flying to the location, and lowering them to the ground. Not to mention the challenges of wind effects in wooded terrain where the helicopter pilot and the technician in the rescue basket are essentially in two different wind regimes.
Then there are the TCO costs, what does it cost to own a helicopter versus say 5 flying suits? If the helicopter is down for maintenance you're stuck, but if a suit is down you still have 4 suits ready to go right? That lowers your risk of not having the capability when you need it. How much? Hard to say without knowing the maintenance regimen of the suits but it seems likely the suits would be more resilience against 100% loss of capability.
While having a smaller fleet of helicopters induces a smaller number of critical failures, if the advantage is the amount of time it takes to get to a location, you'd need a lot of jetpacks to be spread out enough to beat a helicopter. With an advertised endurance of 5-10 minutes, this won't do more than get you a small hop to a remote location. The searching and most of the traversing is going to have to be done by some other vehicle. If every 4x4,truck or ground search party needs to have one of these (and be trained to operate it proficiently), I have a hard time believing that you aren't going to be quickly running an operation that's more expensive then a helo operation. That being said, maybe some areas could use this. Perhaps a place with canyons or cravasses, where people could fall down but rescuers could still mostly move rapidly using ground vehicles.
As far as the downwash, while it is a concern it's also something that can be managed. The heavier the aircraft (more equipment, endurance, and reliability) , the more downwash. This jetpack has a small down wash footprint (but I bet it's still really high under the jets since it's a pure thrust aircraft) but the tradeoff is in endurance and equipment.
But again, there might be some areas that could benefit from it, but I think it's a solution looking for a problem. Other than the gee wiz factor, I doubt any of the SAR agencies in the US would set up a system like this.
I don't want to say that there isn't any application of this tool in a Sar role, but I don't think that this tool is any better than what organizations currently have available. It isn't a game changer, and it isn't going to save lives that would have otherwise been lost. If you wanted to save lives of hikers, you'd spend $400k on personal locator beacons and let people snag them at a ranger station for their hike. That would save more lives than a fancy suit I bet. While I can see there is a scenario where first responders say "wow I'm glad we had the jet pack in the back of the truck" I don't see it being worth the effort to get an agency to the point where every truck and crew has that capability without sacrificing any other capability.
I'm smelling solutionism... It's kind of like that boat "take over" gimmick without a weapon in hand. The enemy force will literally just yell out how many points they're racking up when shooting at a bunch of guys in jetpacks with their hands occupied in not-weaponry. Afterwards, they'll agree not to kill hostages as long as more jetpack guys are sent in for target practice. That whole PR stunt was a complete joke.
Damn, when I was a kid, jetpacks were the coolest idea ever. As they become more of a reality, they're so useless other than for fun.
Even helicopters can take a while to get on station, and typically come from much further away.
While I agree this looks gimmicky, I wonder if they can station many more jetpacks (much cheaper than a helicopter) much closer (ie. every mountain rescue station has one) than a helicopter.
The survival likelihood for EMT callouts drops really quickly as time progresses, so getting there quickly for initial triage and stabilization is more important than getting complex equipment there. They could stabilize and then radio for either a 4x4 or helicopter, using resources appropriate to the situation.
The UK is tiny compared to the US, and 'mountain rescue' is very different compared to the US as well.
For a more focused used of these, see motorcycle medics at races:
Browning's been doing a bunch of demos lately: it feels like they're trying to figure out the best use, whether that's military applications, rescue, or others. This isn't the first rescue demo, although this one looks like it's a bit more useful than the other one (which was disaster response, and which very much looked like a publicity stunt.)
> Browning's been doing a bunch of demos lately
How many other people have been trained to fly this thing? It's telling if it's no-one, that would mean that it's likely prohibitive to insure the danger.
And you notice something interesting in the beginning... this guy is in GOOD shape. Like not just good, we're talking REALLY good, he's in the 0.1percentile, being able to do some pretty difficult callisthenic moves (go to 1:00 in the video to see him doing handstand pushups and flags, these can take years to learn for the common person). And I think it's one of the reasons he made the suit work... because I can't imagine someone NOT being that fit arriving to a working design, given the iterations it required to get everything right in the beginning.
However, I think we can now arrive to a design for the common man thanks to him having iterated through these first versions.
If so this is equivalent to hanging off a bar (the forces are in opposite direction though).
That is certainly not an easy to maintain for long. If one arm gets tired and you cant land you are in big trouble. Also a strong wind gust might be outright deadly.
I thought the number one rule for First Responders was not to cause injury (on the scene or en-route) to yourself or bystanders and not to cause further injury to the casualty.
A "paramedic jet suit" just seems to be waiting for an opportunity for the paramedic to become a statistic as they fly head-first into rocky substance. Then I suppose we will be expected to all feel sorry and cry for the terrible loss of this heroic first responder ... despite the idiotic risks they took.
I hope with improvement in ML it might become safer. Certainly an easier problem to solve than self driving cars.
If cost that much of an issue, a paraglider costs 1/10th as much and are likely much safer to operate. Or if getting a single person on site is all you need, tiny helicopters cost as low as 50k new.
Try to imagine a world where helicopters work in some rescue situations, but not so well in others.
Tight areas... maybe. But if the tree canopy is too tight, I don't see how a dude with a jetpack is truly going to navigate that efficiently. They'll just find a near by clearing to land and hoof over... which, the same can be said of someone in a copter. Though, the one from the copter can ruck 70+ pounds of life saving medical equipment because they're not carrying jetpack equipment.
Forest Fires? I mean, what advantage do they have to smokejumpers? All that extra jetpack gear means less firefighting gear on them.
Look, it's cool. It's awesome. I also want to be the first person to get a DUI in a jetpack. But for the price of a cheap helicopter and going to a scenario such as a fell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fell)... a less complex helicopter that can ACTUALLY carry gear seems like the smarter investment for a search/rescue department.
When that happens, it seems to be because the location (bottom of cliff) has extensive bush covering around it.
That being said, I know nothing at all about any of the above cases. There may have been bad weather involved too, which would probably also be a problem for a jet pack solution.
Odds are that they would have been right - early helicopters probably weren't safe enough to use as ambulances.
Well-run modern air ambulances are very safe edit: perhaps not, see replies (twin-engine helicopters with very experienced pilots) and can serve hundreds of patients per year, generally only serving very urgent cases of course. [0]
My question for the jet-pack folks is why not use a helicopter? Presumably the suit is a great deal cheaper, but are there any other advantages? Curiously the article doesn't mention helicopters at all, but in the video, they did their interview in front of one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London%27s_Air_Ambulance_Chari...
Mentioned elsewhere in this thread:
His comment: "We are ready to take risks. That is part of our work, just like cops' or soldiers'. Some missions are extra risky - industrial accidents or anything involved drugged or drunk people. We still take that risk."
IDK what the hazards of a first generation jetpack are, but odds are he would try it out eagerly.
I'm not sure if those figures are true globally or just for the US.
[0] https://www.flyingmag.com/aircraft/helicopters/air-ambulance...
I dropped my friend a line and he answered back with a detailed description of his helo accident. It was one helluva freakish story.
They loaded an older lady in a hilly, wooded area not quite close to Ostrava (the largest city in the region, my birthplace). She had symptoms of a serious stroke, it was 1998, no one really expected her to live long, but not that short either.
A few minutes into the flight something (a nut?) exploded in the rotor and they went down like a stone. Very, very hard crash, still in a hilly, wooded area, but close to a big water reservoir, an artificial lake.
The lady died on impact. All other people on board survived with serious injuries, but they were saved by an unbelievable coincidence. A mine rescue team from Ostrava had a regular training on the lake and the helicopter crashed in their sight, less than a kilometer away. So they were there in like 3 minutes, dragged them to safety and put the burning wreck out.
If this was a movie, it would look totally unrealistic. But it happened.
Three months of rehabilitation and friend's lower back is still bad. He cannot stand completely upright, tilts slightly to a side.
Here's the best explanation I know of: https://youtu.be/jDg1G2y8ZX4?t=293
(As far as I can tell no-one has made an animation of what happens.)
Good point, went down like a stone is unlikely to be true.
> a type of rotor system that wouldn't typically be used in an air ambulance setting
Sure, I didn't phrase my comment very well, hadn't meant to imply otherwise.
I bet it's anything but cheap.
Having volunteered as a first responder in the White Mountains of New England and with a few friends who dealt with mountain rescues, particularly winter mountain rescues, I strongly disagree with you. There are plenty of places where there are significant numbers of people hiking/climbing/skiing/snowboarding, a vertical range of <6000', horizontal distance of just a mile or two, and yet it can easily take hours from the nearest road/building to reach someone on foot (with no vehicle travel possible and even helicopters often infeasible plus based from quite a distance away). While something like this could turn that into minutes. And going by foot, as well as extracting people, isn't without significant risk too many times of the year (particularly if you're trying to move quickly).
Yes, no doubt this will need significant refinement (just like helicopters). There may be much better possible designs, as well as numerous improvements to be made in terms of auto control. Heck, rather then suits maybe one of those flying platforms or a big drone someone can hang from make more sense. But the idea of getting a few rescuers with some basic kit to an accident high up on a mountain in a matter of minutes with the ability to do an aerial survey/search as they come in? There is nothing gimmicky about it. Minutes let alone hours save people.
>I thought the number one rule for First Responders was not to cause injury (on the scene or en-route) to yourself or bystanders and not to cause further injury to the casualty.
Wilderness rescue is inherently risky, but for that matter so is medical work in general. The goal is certainly to have a large net improvement in overall wellness, so they don't want people, particularly not First Responders which means relatively little training, rush into dangerous situations and cause more trouble for everyone. But somebody using something like this, or doing wilderness rescue at all, is going to be trained beyond that level. And intelligent weighing of risks based on level of training and equipment is core to the entire mission.
>Then I suppose we will be expected to all feel sorry and cry for the terrible loss of this heroic first responder ... despite the idiotic risks they took.
Get the hell over yourself. Holy crap.
It sounds like this organisation would like to have more capability in house.
Although, I'm not sure if the extra capability would be worth the risks from flying an experimental jetsuit...
Also, you can easily put a cheaper, more fuel efficient, and safer paraglider in the back of a van which can also carry even more supplies.
That said, I don't have any personal experience with paragliders, so perhaps there are VTOL options?
we don't see a lot of military programs until long after they have either been shut down or morphed into something new.
everything kills, people just need to recognize the simple fact that that government which can provide you with roads, water, health care, and more, has the same power to deprive you and others of the same. the trouble is finding politicians who appeal to your sense of helping others and not in electing them to do unto others.
Seriously, I want one! (But it's probably too expensive!)