It consists of 4 small jet engines (each of 250 hp!) mounted vertically in a sort of “quadrotor” arrangement, plus two more smaller ones mounted horizontally to control “yaw”. Operator wears a backpack that is a jetfuel reservoir. There’s obviously some fairly serious control software.
It showed up in April of this year. How did I miss it then?
This thing would have to be quite expensive, and probably dangerous. I want one.
while I’ve no doubt this thing works, some of the claims don’t pass the sniff test, and The Verge is far too credulous over “new and shiny” stuff. turbojets of that size don’t make “250 horsepower.” at that size you’re looking at about 50-60 lbs of thrust max.
“Hello, Allstate? You’re not going to believe this, but…”
A nephew has a very nice quad copter drone. He uses it, for fun, but also his job as a geologist for an oil company. And a Friend that is a draftsman for a company that takes care of irrigation ditches and such. They can park near, and check out problems without having to hike all day.
Nothing too amazing to it. You could strap a rocket engine to anything. The limitation isn’t the rocket, the limitation is the amount of fuel you can carry.
Technically, it doesn’t have to be wrong. Power is dependent on the exit velocity. 250 hp is 186 kW. 60 lbs is 267 newtons. Divide and you get 700 m/s. That’s mach 2, which is almost certainly higher than the real exit velocity, but it’s not unimaginable.
The fuel consumption is almost certainly north of 250 hp worth, though.
He looks pretty confident, however, he sure did keep those jet skis on a short leash. The linked article (in a quick scan) made it sound like he only hit the water once, so I’m surprised he was so concerned, unless the machine was acting up that morning.
From what news I can gather on the Infobahn, a company called Implant Sciences bought the makers of Flyboard Air. Implant Sciences is a privately held defence contractor. They’ve declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy and (some of?) their other assets have been bought by another company called L-3. So it’s hard to say exactly what the status of the Flyboard is, but my spidey-sense is tingling… (well, OK, maybe it’s just gas…)
