The age of personal flight in which a human can take to the skies with nothing more than a jet-powered pack on the back has come closer after a New Zealand inventor's machine soared to a height of more than 1,500 metres for the first time.
The Martin Jetpack's remote-controlled test flight over New Zealand's South Island, with a crash-test dummy in the flying seat, was monitored by inventor Glenn Martin from a helicopter.
With that success under his belt, Martin, who has been working on his flying machine for 30 years, said he intends to put it on the market in 2012 at a cost of about $100,000 each.
After the test, the dummy and the jetpack returned to earth by firing a rocket-propelled parachute, demonstrating the critical requirement that a flyer could survive a mid-air engine failure.
"We have done our best to make it as safe as it can possibly be,'' said Martin, of Christchurch, who started work in a garden shed on his dream of personal flight as a university student 30 years ago.
He told TVNZ that previously his jetpack and an earlier machine called the Bell Rocket Belt could get only a few feet off the ground.
This prompted some ridicule in the media when he demonstrated the Martin Jetpack at the Oshkosh air show, in Wisconsin, three years ago.
Yet even then its potential was apparent and two years later Time magazine named it as one of the top 50 modern inventions.
Martin has had many setbacks over the years and has spent at least $9 million Cdn in savings and venture capital to pursue his dream.
The recent test flight has brought his dream of floating his company on the stock market to raise enough capital to get the jetpack to the point of mass commercial production a lot closer.
Courtesy DPA |
E-mail
