Be very wary of companies like this. This company looks more legit than some, but there are a lot of companies out there that are promising all kinds of fantastic devices that will never see the light of day. Often they advertise them in magazines like Popular Mechanics, offering ‘info-kits’ for sale for $25 or $50, and seeking ‘investors’. Excited potential buyers (or dreaming kids) plonk down the money, and get a few pamphlets in the mail consisting of rendered drawings, a crappy little technical booklet full of made-up statistics, and little else.
Eventually, you discover that the company’s real product is the ‘info-kit’, and the fanciful aircraft they are ‘selling’ is nothing more than a fiberglass mockup shell.
Have a look at this: The SoloTrek XFV. Look familiar? It was in ‘flight trials’ ten years ago, and was supposed to be available within a year or two. The company even had NASA on board for some form of testing. It failed, and the company is gone. The guy who designed that also ‘designed’ a VTOL airplane called the “Aurora 400” which was heavily advertised in Popular Mechanics - see it here. Note the $37 price tag for a ‘47 page development report’. That was the real product, and no one ever saw an Aurora 400.
Sometimes these companies actually do real engineering work, but are run by people who lack insight or common sense and don’t understand how unreasonable their plans are. The prototypical (heh) example of this would be the Moller Skycar. Paul Moller is a real professor of aeronautical engineering, and has built some pretty cool stuff. But his ‘Skycar’ has been suckering investors and kids desperate for his ‘info-kits’ for something like 30 years now. It’s always only a year or two away from real flight trials. His performance numbers don’t add up, most other engineers who look at the design think it’s a draggy, uncertifiable mess with so many technical hurdles and safety issues that it doesn’t have a hope in hell of ever being more than a one-off prototype which will be lucky to ever even get the point where it can transition from hover to vertical flight, let alone be a practical vehicle.
But every year or two, some credulous organization like CNN or People Magazine will get sucked in to the hype and do a big feature on the Skycar, saying that it will be flying in a year or two and that a revolution in personal transportation is just around the corner. This no doubt results in a new flood of money to Moller who, judging by his current website, uses it to commission more 3D renderings of the thing looking cool in the sky instead of spending the money on actual research.
Back to that Australian ‘jetpack’. It looks like it actually flies, but don’t take its claim of safety too seriously. It suffers from the same flaws as the SoloTrek - a ballistic parachute doesn’t help much when you’re within a few hundred feet of the ground, and devices like this would spend almost all their time in that regime. It uses a 2-stroke engine to save weight, but those engines are not as reliable as typical aircraft engines. It’s a complex device full of moving parts that have high loads on them (imagine the gyroscopic precession forces on those big rotor pods). If any of those components fail - instant death. Helicopters and airplanes have passive safety - a helicopter will auto-rotate to the ground if the engine fails, and an airplane will glide. This thing becomes a brick if the engine fails. And that’s probably the best failure - if a pod breaks or it throws a rotor or ingests a large bird, it’ll probably shake itself to pieces, and you with it.
One day, one of these companies will get far enough to make something that’s actually saleable. If they do, it’ll be $150,000, and will be sold as an experimental device, available only to well-heeled homebuilt aircraft enthusiasts with a high tolerance for risk. And a few will be killed flying it, and then the rest of them will be mothballed or trotted out for use under controlled conditions as demonstrators or movie props - like the actual jet pack that’s been around for decades and works just fine so long as you don’t fly it for more than half a minute or so.
Here’s the real deal. Hey, it’s only $150,000 for a 30 second range. Well, $150,000 and the cost of a good orthopedic surgeon, anyway. Apparently, they have a tendency to destroy knees, since you’re landing on your legs wearing 150 lbs on your back.
I wish I didn’t have to be so pessimistic about this, because I was one of those kids drooling over those fantastic ads. If I’d had the money for the info-kits, I would have purchased all of them. Too bad almost all turned out to be frauds.
So whatever happened to Michael Moshier, the guy who ‘developed’ the Aurora 400 and the SoloTrek XFV that got so much attention a few years ago? It looks like he’s selling an ‘Anti-Aging Straight Talk’ report - only $29.95 for a PDF file.
He’s also a Confidential Business Consultant, touting his ability to earn tons of money for 35 years while not producing a single viable product. He specializes in ‘Way Out of the Box’ thinking.
