Personal jetpack in 2012 for $100,000
ubergizmo.com
ubergizmo.com
Segways, as well as water jetpacks, are lots of fun. Care less.
Pairing of money and mouth: Me falling off a Segway like a 'tard. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0Zk5eFAHJU )
regardless, the USA may be very liberal in terms of regulations for ultralight aircraft, but other nations are definitely not. In most other places there are certification and licensing requirements for anything above an unpowered hanglider. In Australia and Europe you need a pilots license for an ultralight craft.
If this does make it to production, and does manage to take advantage of ultralight regulations, I can see the laws being changed to require certification and licensing (or outright bans) in the same way many cities, states etc. responded to the Segway and low-powered bicycles.
There is just no way that they are going to allow people in suburban areas to take off in one of these without a license and without certification - and very likely not at all
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultralight_aviation#United_Stat...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powered_paragliding#License_and...
[Paramotoring has the distinct advantage of being fail safe with regards to motor failures.]
Other applications might include law enforcement, or perhaps search and rescue? Helicopters can't get everywhere...
If you did fly it work, I'd imagine you'd look like you rode a motorcycle to work. So, pack a a change of clothes and wear a helmet.
If you can book 10 hours a month, the machine is paid for in 10 months. Since you'd likely get a lot of press right off with very little effort, you could probably book a lot more time than that.
OF course your clients would have to sign away all liability and no one would insure it so you'd have to figure out how much this thing is to repair but I could see someone making a tidy living off of these things.
Why is this good news? Half an hour in the air with a max speed of 63mph is something we don't want to regulate?
I'll wait for 2-5 years for them to grow,and in the mean time the jetpack will become safer!
Especially if you've never done this before I'd expect that you might need a bit more runway than just 100K. YC pulled it off to have reddit and loopt in their first batch but it did take the combined efforts of Robert Morris, Paul Graham, Trevor Blackwell and Jessica Livingston to decide on those five.
It may have helped that for none of them it was the only money they had.
I applaud you for being daring but typically the failure rate of start-ups is such that you'd need pretty deep pockets as an inexperienced and relatively unknown investor to make a go of it.
On top of that you'll be in competition with other incubators with more visibility which likely will attract the 'hot' ones first.
The interesting question to me is what kind of flight profile I'd use. 1,000 feet and fast? Or low and slow? If you knew where the power lines and towers were, it'd almost make sense to do something like fly at 100-200' or so at max speed. Assuming you had ten seconds or more of notice before the thing shut down, you could probably plop yourself quickly into some kind of landing. Much easier that screwing around with the parachute. If I were going to be doing engine diagnostics and parachute drills, I'd want to be up in the 3000-5000' range, and personally I'd get a little woozy at that altitude zooming along without nav lights, a transponder, or even a big profile. But perhaps that's the recommended operation?