Video taken by pilots of what could be the elusive Los Angeles jet pack guy
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
Whatever that object is, it's too small to hold enough batteries to contain the energy needed to lift a human being for any serious length of time. Even using chemical storage like gasoline or kerosine, you'd need to bring a very large tank with you to stay airborne any length of time. There's no lifting body, like wings, to make staying aloft more efficient either, like an airplane uses.
My guess is that it's a prank. A fairly large drone loosely carrying a very light dummy. And as far as pranks go, they have succeeded.
https://youtu.be/y9B7WdlRafc?t=128
They quote endurance as 10 min and I presume it could go longer with an extra gas tank https://jetpackaviation.com/jetpacks/
Fuel seems to be about 5 gal kerosene for 8 min flight.
JetPack Aviation are located about 35 miles from the sighting so it seems a reasonable bet that it's one of their bits of kit.
There are limits to that. If you carry an extra gas tank, then you're lifting even more mass- fuel is heavy! There are significant diminishing returns on carrying more fuel.
That said, you do make some great points- I could well be wrong.
I suspect the FBI are over there asking a lot of questions too, lol.
It's unlikely to be an electric vehicle if it's carrying a full-sized human. You just need so much weight in batteries & swept area for props for more than a couple minutes of flight that it's difficult to pack it into a form factor anything like the size & shape of a human.
Given the location and the current state of the technology, though, a liquid fueled jetpack is perfectly possible. It doesn't have to be very efficient if the flight is only a few minutes long. A typical helicopter may achieve 5 hours in the air without any lift to glide ratio. Jets are less efficient, but still efficient enough for short flights.
You may infer a TWR limitation of jet aircraft. It's real, but it's not driven by technical limitations of the jet propulsion technology, but rather by maximizing the range using optimal amounts of lift & fuel for a fixed mass of engine. It doesn't make much sense to use engines so powerful & heavy as a fraction of aircraft mass that they can hover straight up to cruising altitude; If you had engines that powerful, you would be hanging a bigger fuel tank on the vehicle and launch it conventionally. VTOL at high subsonic or faster is an exceedingly range-limited means of flight.
Such a discovery could kick off a new industrial revolution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQzLrvz4DKQ
Still dangerous and stupid to be out over the water let alone flying around airliners.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyboard_Air
They claim up to 9800 feet in altitude, so it seems very likely if anything.
A thousand foot of very strong fishing wire https://www.amazon.com/Sufix-Performance-Braid-300-Spool/dp/... is a mere 0.15 lbs, if Amazon’s description is to be believed.
So as a guide wire even with multiple strands (for redundancy) I think 3000 feet is very achievable.
But a gas turbine (a jet engine, basically) is efficient, kerosene is very energetic, and for a hoverboard I imagine the hot & compressed exhaust itself is what’s mechanically useful.
There’s no reason to have a line other than as a tether, though that comes with its own risks.
So more "hoverboard" than "jet pack" might be the future headlines. Or at least jet-pack-like hoverboard. The flight time impressive I guess, not sure of the state of these things.
Edit: I'm guessing the jet skis are following him to recover some expensive hardware quickly and the dude himself.
Edit: I also wonder about the legality of this. Ultralights don't need to be registered and this would probably fall under that category. I think they are limited to Class E/G airspace.
Here's an article about a crash that occurred just a few months ago: https://www.dailybreeze.com/2020/10/04/1-dead-after-ultra-li...
I haven't yet personally seen Jet Pack Guy, but with the FAA/FBI involved, I'm sure we will soon know who he is.
Why else put text ON TOP of the footage?
Because they are flight instructors, not video editors?
Because they wanted their text to exist anywhere the video was shared?
Seems like a safe way to get a ton of free press then say it was a marketing stunt in a few days. Aviation websites would be covering this a lot more seriously if it had credibility. Not reporting it to the FAA is also a weird move if it is real.
Here is the article with a statement from the FAA: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/38403/video-taken-by-p...
Isn't that an Instagram thing?
The video has clearly been altered.
https://m.dpreview.com/articles/0727694641/here-s-how-to-pix...
The cat is out of the bag, it's easy to make a drone at home out of generic parts. Anyone who wants to fly a drone into prohibited airspace can do it. And an even remotely-sophisticated attacker could do it with almost no chance of getting caught. That's just the world we live in now.
Anti-drone technology is advancing. Chengdu airport installed what looks like a fire-finder radar, usually used to track artillery shells. Avaelliant has a drone detection system for sale, and it's in use at a few airports. Both are phased array radars, with no moving parts and flat antenna panels. Avaelliant's unit looks like a big cell phone tower antenna.
[1] https://southerncrossdrones.com/aveillant-uas-detection-syst...
(But likely a dummy as some have mentioned)
There's at least two or three Air Force bases in the area around Palo Verdes. I don't think they'd be flying some secret prototype in that area and in broad daylight like this, but its always hard to figure out what and why the military does sometimes.
(Hughes was based out of Culver City in LA.)
I Fooled the Internet with A FAKE Jetpack At The Airport... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td9n5-QUGKM
3d metal printers (such as makerforge) let home engineers design/build all kinds of bizarre stuff that wasn't possible till it was one day.
It's looks like a pile of balloons released from some party.
That also fits technically outside of UFO tech.
But this is a CIA/UFO tech forum. No point trying to explain it's not a drone, or a balloon made to look like a jet pack or a weather balloon. The normal X-files Scully stuff is fun. Boring things like party balloons are boring.
Now compared to over land, you can easily land a small piston engine plane just about anywhere. Highways, large parking lots, open fields, all become acceptable landing spots. In a Cessna 172 which is commonly used for flight training, impact speed can be as slow as 45 knots. Even a crash into a dense forest is survivable with some luck.
I guess I’m just not familiar enough with LA airspace to fully appreciate the lack of space for training flights. I’ve been in and out of LAX and it is busy no doubt. I just haven’t done GA operations in that area so I wasn’t all that familiar with all of the additional airports and traffic.
Personally, my pucker factor would be exceptionally high practicing stalls, or multi-engine training with engine shutdowns and Vmc demos over open water. Regardless of the temperature.
At least locally with idiots pointing lazers near airports usually the culprits get apprehended in fairly short order.
Is it this usual for a repeated event near a busy airport to go on without intervention?
No one knows who they are, so they're obviously unregistered. But they're flying into the arrival and departure paths of LAX. So they will be in a heap of trouble once they're identified. That makes this latest sighting all the more brazen.
The previous sightings do sound like this person busted the bravo but I’d have to do more research to be sure.
Isn't this just saying that you have no way to avoid being hit by an airplane, no transponder, maybe no radio, no flightpath, and are breaking about a million laws by doing so?
(I mean, doesn't address the "short range" problem, but "idiocy" seems sufficient to overcome all the rest.)
Spoiler!
The footage turned out to be fabricated by military. The scientists still built a prototype of the jetpack. Not so fast, light and agile but they made something that was previously considered impossible.
The sensing was easy and worked fine, but at the end of the project they could never replicate the seamless pairing of the device to the phone. Left with all sorts of theories about hacked network stacks...they admitted defeat. Only to then learn: the device was transmitting data with inaudible soundwaves picked up by the phone's microphone.
What you're hinting at can cut both ways: you can fake the magical, while often the magical is far simpler than you thought.
"I just got back from a super-secret conference where someone you don't know--and can't ask questions of--gave me a private demonstration of how they're doing ___ using nothing but Coca-Cola and Mentos.
Your request for funding for ___ is denied, but I'll meet you halfway-- here's a pack of Mentos."
Started searching and found a thread on stackexchange. It looks like thaere are several stories with such a plot: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/74090/scientists-s...
But apparently this idea was already... in the air.