Gizmodo: martin jetpack

Martin Jetpack: How Much Would You Pay to Be a Real Life Test Pilot?

Danny Allen — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:20:00 EDT

An eBay auction (ending in 10-hours) offers the chance to be part of the Jetpack's first public test pilot program. You'll need to have a driver's license, be over 18, under 198lbs...oh, and have a spare $35,000 lying around.

Holy crap. Considering the thing will cost about $100,000 when it goes on sale, that's pretty extreme—even if you will be recorded as an official test pilot. Adding insult to injury, a lucky New Zealander (the Jetpack's home country) won a local auction for about US$4130.

More a personal helicopter than a Jetpack (its lift is driven by two ducted fans), it can theoretically reach as high as 8,000 feet, and move as fast as 60 miles per hour. The company is even negotiating a "multi-million dollar deal" to supply an as-yet unknown foreign government's civil emergency services.

You might also remember that our own Mark Wilson actually got the chance to take one for a spin—and ask its makers some important questions. As for me? My budget probably limits me to this $2500 home made kludge-job. Such is life. [eBay via Martin Jetpack via New Zealand Herald]

Jetpack Inventor Answers the Hard Questions (and One Fun One)

Mark Wilson — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:45:00 EDT

There's more than a little skepticism surrounding the new Martin Jetpack. Promising a new era of ultralight flight, many of the claims (altitude capabilities and safety, especially) sound too good to be true. Before we took our test flight, we asked Glenn Martin, inventor, some of the tougher questions that we hadn't seen asked anywhere else. Being a good sport, he actually answered them:

What's with all the videos showing people just a few feet from the ground? Can this thing actually go higher or not?

Have you ever had an accident?

OK, what's it feel like to fly?

Links for the rest of our Martin Jetpack coverage:
Hands-on Impressions
Flight Video

Hands On: Jetpack!

Mark Wilson — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:30:00 EDT

“Don’t cover your ears, this is what you paid to see!” Glenn Martin shouts to me over the apocalyptic roar of an F22 fighter jet performing a leisurely flyby. He’d abruptly broken off a conversation with someone else just to make this point—before we’d even been introduced and hours before I flew his pack. “That’s 3.15 billion of your tax dollars at work!”

Well, here's the video of my flight with Glenn Martin's jetpack ($100,000 of someone else's money at work). And for those who may have missed it, I wrote about the experience in explicit detail yesterday. Even though it's pretty comedic to watch me fumbling around a foot off the ground, the ride really is intense from the cockpit. [Video shot by Jon Schwab, Edited by Mark Wilson]