'Person in jetpack' spotted flying again near LA airport | Hacker News Reader

'Person in jetpack' spotted flying again near LA airport

bbc.co.uk

169 pointsiamben156 comments

The whole ATC system is based on the underlying idea that stuff isn’t supposed to be in certain places at a certain time. For example the system can operate without radar in zero visibility conditions because it can use a “one in one out” philosophy where a certain 3D block of the Sky only has one flying object in it. Random drones, jet packs or whatever turning up unannounced in busy airspace totally destroys that system (irrespective of other issues) hence why when something like this happens you see the FBI rocking up and treating this like they are.

To be more numerical, generally non-airplanes are supposed to stay below 500' AGL, and outside airport areas down to the ground as charted on sectional maps.

So a jetpack flying around at 3000' sounds like an airspace violation, unless it's over a hilly area to 2500'.

And it should (at least looking from outside the system) stay that way. That's pretty serious business and violations should be treated harshly. Some flying items did not exist or were not massively adopted just a few years ago, but I would not like it to become a "new normality" to expect them where they should most certainly not be. As far as I'm concerned, just shoot the damn thing down.

Here [1] is the ATC conversation. She sent IDAHO30 (military aircraft) to go looking for them. IDAHO30 did not find the jetpack.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jblAQXY8AKo

ATC talks a lot faster than I would have expected. Seems like that would be problematic.

It's necessary in busy airspace such as around LAX, due to limited frequency-time. Pilots are used to it.

"Problematic". seriously?

Show HN: New JS Library to revolutionize Problematic ATC

I'm not the person you're responding to, but - yeah, that's a perfectly reasonable word in this situation. "Likely to cause problems". They're not (I assume!) trying to make any social-justice-related implications.

(I don't actually agree with the evaluation - ATC and associated parties are probably well-adjusted to that speed of communication)

That's exactly how the social justice types operate: they inject themselves into a subculture they know nothing about, but feel like should assert control over and start calling things they don't understand "problematic". That's how you end up with pronoun rules in ATC operations.

Are you okay?

Are you claiming that the word "problematic" was not in use before it started being used in social justice contexts?

ATC and Pilots use a subset of language, they get by with mostly the same 200 words and the formats of most calls is largely the same. So you know what to expect.

Additionally, ATC and Pilots require readback, ie you say what you understood. Only when ATC understands your readback will they assume you understood anything.

Everyone is using a restricted subset of language. 90% of the communication ATC uses is with the same 200 words or so, and most of the people involved (ATCs, pilots) know what is expected next.

Exactly. I'm going to get my clearance in the same format every time. It will be a clearance limit, route, altitude, frequency, and transponder code. The automated weather information will come in the same order at every airport, etc. It is much easier to follow once you have experience with the system.

All safety and instruction communication must be read back and identified. If the read-back is incorrect, or the pilot responds with "say again" (or even "speak slower"), then the controller can slow down, but the controller never just assumes understanding.

The meat of the actual conversation:

> [Airliner] We just saw a bright object at about 6000 ft

> [ATC] Can you say that one more time?

> [Airliner] We just saw a flying object - like a flying object passing by at 6000'

> [ATC] Flying object, was it a UAV or was it a jetpack?

> [Airliner] Like a jetpack. Too shiny and too far.

"PERSON IN JETPACK SEEN OVER LAX!" seems to overinterpret that exchange.

> [ATC] Flying object, was it a UAV or was it a jetpack?

this has occurred enough times that this is now a question ATC rattles off. just.wow.sad.

By wording their question like that, they may actually be priming pilots to report ambiguous sightings as jetpack sightings.

That's the point. Nothing good comes from ambiguity in these matters, in fact it could be quite damaging to the careers of those involved if they reported anything that sounded vaguely UFO-ish. Best to have a catch-all like jetpack, drones, etc so there won't be any unpleasant questions later.

If you are implying deliberate misdirection by ATC, then I do not agree. It's more likely ATC prompted the pilot with the jetpack possibility because they believe it's happened before recently in that area.

I think ATC, expecting a jetpack, may have inadvertently primed the pilot to interpret an unknown object as a jetpack.

Sad? I was just thinking how awesome that was. If I read that this exchange happened in 2020 when I was a child I would think the future was going well.

(Obviously I do not condone jetpacking in restricted airspace)

It had happened no more than once AFAIK

while that may be true, you know that all ATC meetings had this reported to them so they are all aware and on the look out for it. it only goes to make sense. if someone was developing a jetpack unit, they would need to do multiple test flights. if they were dumb enough to do it the first time, they are probably willing to do it a second time.

Not heavily reported is that ATC tasked a military aircraft that was already in airspace with callsign IDAHO30 to turn westbound and check it out.

There's no evidence that it was a military aircraft. Based on the IDAHO call sign, it was probably police, or maybe feds.

ATC sounded like she was putting words in the pilot’s mouth.

“Like a jetpack” followed by “Too shiny and too far” != “jetpack man spotted again”.

I just listened to the audio, and maybe, but.... "Too shiny and too far" made me think the response was to the ATC's question about drone and assuming drone would be something in the DJI realm of object size. The pilot was implying that it was too far away to be that visible from reflection to be a consumer drone.

This is just how ATC conversations go. The plane could literally be on fire and the controller would still be like "Ok. So I guess now that you're on fire, you want to turn around and land?"

Pilot: "Yes we can do that."

The issue is that ATC is the one that suggested it could be a jetpack.

The fact that ATC is suggesting it normalizes jetpacks in a way that no amount of pilot reports could.

...or maybe the controller watched Ironman last night. Which is more likely?

We don't have any evidence on ATC watching Ironman last night, but we do have evidence on JetPack last month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4tQyEV9Hl0

That was a very strange interaction... I thought this was something to be avoided by ATC, suggesting things. Usually the conversational training is asking out details with no influence, and repeat question to make clear the answer was not understood. Right?

I wonder if "like a flying object" really is correctly transcribed. It's difficult to hear at this quality, but to me it sounds more like "like a flying suit jet".

The end of the sentence could also have been "too fast" rather than "too far", which would make more sense together with the certainty in "like a jetpack".

Yea the transcript of that video is definitely not accurate. The pilot was the first to mention the flying suit jet pack, not ATC.

A jetpack at 6000 ft? That seems rather unlikely.

What makes you say that? 6000' doesn't strike me as particularly high.

Flight time of a jetsuit is about 10 minutes. Rate of climb on a full tank is 500 ft/min and doubles as fuel burns off. Flying a jetsuit to 6000 ft seems like a spectacular way to commit suicide.

Not if you have an Arc reactor in your chest.

Only if they took off from ground level.

Flying into the approach path of LAX also seems suicidal. If the reports from this and the previous incident are accurate, the person responsible is exceedingly reckless.

Only way it's possible is if it's a jet-powered wingsuit dropped from a plane, but that is as unlikely as a jetpack, just for other reasons.

That french guy with a jetpack started out that way. He did all his testing at high altitude and when he was done, he popped his parachute. It was only later that he took off near the ground.

The 3 A's from flight school - Aircraft, Area, Altitude

He definitely wasn't flying at 2000 ft. More like 100.

https://youtu.be/de_YJzKeGKU

Could also be a person in a squirrel suit. Looks exactly the same.

I thought that initially, but the transcript is wrong or at least questionable, the pilot says something like:

> We just saw a flying object like a flight suit jet pack pass by at 6000

He may also have said “Too shiny and too fast” at the end as well

Oh wow, thanks for the link.

I had heard this job was super stressful, but hearing the lady talk nonstop like that for only 6 minutes gave me a completely different perspective. Shit is insane, I was tense. I can't imagine doing it for 8 hours every day...

That's why there's an intake age limit. They like the start ATCs off when they're young. Also the reason why, if you ever get to visit an ATC center, you'll see a lot of tattoos. Inking is very popular among ATCs.

Not sure if this clip was cut or not, but VASA (and almost all other ATC channel) trimmed silence part.

Controllers work in sprints with breaks in between. I don't think anyone could do the job for even 4 hours straight (in anything other than the sleepiest tower position).

It's not legal to work 4 hours straight, at least in the US. The legal maximum time is 2 hours.

My hometown tower (KLWM) sees very little traffic and I feel like I talk to the same controller all morning long. It's possible they've got two people working each shift, but that doesn't match my experience and when I asked for a tower tour a few years ago, I specifically had to wait for a day where they had multiple controllers in the tower. (They are a contract tower [NFCT] equipped with D-BRITE but primarily controlling traffic visually, if that makes a difference.)

14 CFR § 65.47 provides for a maximum of 10 consecutive hours.

I'm not sure why the YouTube video claims that IDAHO30 is a military aircraft; As far as I know there's no evidence of that, and IDAHO is often used by non-military law enforcement. In particular it's been used by the Riverside PD.

It was probably either a local police department, or feds.

See for example page 2:

https://catalog.archives.gov/OpaAPI/media/7603178/content/dc...

Page 21:

http://www.sjpd.org/records/pc-13650_library/unit%20guidelin...

https://www.scandiego.com/viewtopic.php?t=1701

It's used by San Francisco Sheriff as well....Auxiliary Air Squadron.....Civilian volunteers who own planes...very common in CA Sheriff's Departments

Usually used by local sheriff auxiliary air squadrons....San Francisco has one....civilian plane owners volunteering to assist LE....

This LA Times article says it was a law enforcement aircraft: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-10-16/is-someo...

I thought this was probably a man-in-a-jetpack shaped balloon last time it happened, now at 6000 feet it surely is. The Venn diagram of people capable of making/flying one, and people wanting to do so round LAX, surely has a substantially bigger intersection for balloon than for actual jetpack.

This happened last month too didn't it? You'd think airport security would have heightened in the period since, especially at LAX.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36096/airline-pilots-l...

Discussed on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24341535 (477 comments)

To be fair, the ATC led the pilot to the conclusion "jet pack". It was not an independent observation from the pilot. It could have very well been an aircraft drone.

I find this jetpack story unlikely. I would imagine anyone with the means and knowledge to use a jet pack would know to respect the airspace near an airport (even if just for their own safety!).

Could it be some kind of marketing stunt to drum up attention around jetpacks ahead of an official announcement? It's irresponsible, unsafe and illegal, but you can't deny that it works - they've made the news.

To poke the bear that is the federal government in such a loud and aggressive way is a good way to bring the full weight of the federal government down on such a company. Air travel is vital to our modern economy. To weaken its perceived safety and security in the name of profit would not end well for them.

Absolutely, but you write like we don't have startup CEOs doing stupid immature things [1] frequently...

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776

Elon Musk's immaturity may affect the perceived legitimacy of his own company, but his actions don't affect the perceived legitimacy of an entire category of the economy like such a jetpack exploit would.

It seems extremely likely that the market cap of Tesla is larger than the market cap of all jetpack companies combined. In any case you assume that any such CEO is concerned with the fate of other companies in the same space, an assumption for which the proof is extremely lacking.

Car in Mars orbit.

worth ninety-seven billion.

his tweets hurt my butt.

It would be less dangerous if they had ADS-B so that other planes could actually see them. There are small units that are not so expensive, so no excuse to not have one in such a dense controlled air space.

But then everyone would know who it was and exactly where it was, is, and is going.

Presumably, the person flying a freaking jet pack around the LA Area has enough money and smarts to know these things... and I doubt they want to be found.

I look at it this way. If I was going to pull this stunt, I know I am going to get into a lot of trouble as is. So with ADS-B, I can at least let other planes see my GPS/Altitude and I can leave all the other data empty. This does not provide who I am, but shows at least some attempt to mitigate risk. The FAA are all about mitigating risk. Also less likely I would get a face full of prop. The person doing this could turn it back off at lower altitude to avoid people seeing where they landed.

A startup that waited until they had a high-functioning product doing what it's actually supposed to do, and then launched their PR campaign? unlikely.

If your scenario was accurate they would have registered a domain and put up a bunch of staged photos and doctored video footage, then initiated a media blitz about how they've solved the biggest challenges and are taking investment.

this is the second time in a couple months a jetpack has been reported flying at LAX though, and nobody has claimed credit. If it only happened once and then we all learned who it was during the initial press cycle, i could see it being a marketing stunt. but violating restricted airspace multiple times without anybody finding out who you are is a pretty bad marketing stunt.

it might be some startup testing their experimental aircraft, but if it is they're either bad at marketing, bad at navigating, or both.

What is so unlikely / surprising to you about someone with apparent wealth and aviation knowledge doing something illegal / selfish?

It is surprising that someone with aviation knowledge, wealth, and technical skill would greatly increase the risk of their own death by flying their jetpack into the approach path of a major airport. The only thing to be gained is anonymous notoriety.

There were two independent pilots who reported it previously. This is the third sighting around the same area.

Is there a pilot conspiracy?

Human beings don't need to conspire to be mistaken, especially when primed. Were the pilots truly independent, or did the second one hear someone say "jetpack" on the radio first?

>> Is there a pilot conspiracy?

Groupthink. Pilots see strange things, strange things very quickly moving past their aircraft. If they have "jet man" in their minds, they will see jetman.

Similar things have happened with drones. Brief every pilots about small drones and for the next couple weeks ever paper bag or large bird whipping past them on approach will be identified as a drone. They aren't tell lies. They actually believe they saw the drone. The human brain is just very good at filling in blurry images with known things.

The first two sighting were in a usual jet pack height (800m). This one was now way too high. Technically possible for a few seconds, but incredibly stupid if so. But never underestimate the stupidity of rich Los Angeles folks, you see it weekly in the movies.

800m is still grossly out of class G unregulated airspace. Anyone with enough guts to fly in a jet pack has a high chance of at least having a private pilot’s license. They’d know it is against FAA policy and can result in fines or imprisonments. This in addition to local laws.

LAX, the area around the airport is full of the combination of people who both have a lot of spare money (just to be able to rent around there) and have a bit of a thrillseaking / extreme sport bent (surfers, skateboarders, kiteboarders so on) if anyone is likely to own a jetpack it's people living in that area. if anyone is likely to be bored enough to fly around IN a jetpack (when quarantined) it's people in that area.

I'm highly unsurprised (I live not too far from that area)

If the theory is that it is someone living around there - it seems very unlikely they could take off or land without being spotted. From 1000ft to 0ft they would be in the view of tens of thousands of people.

yeah in today's world of dashcams and cell phone cams i am surprised there isn't footage of it if it were one.

I don't know much about real live person sized jetpacks, aren't they really loud and large and expensive? Wouldn't this likely be seen/filmed by others around LA and end up on social media if it was a real live person in a real jetpack?

I guess I'm thinking it's more likely a drone or something?

Yeah, 6000 ft. was raised my suspicion. Really? A jetpack at 6000 ft.?

Entirely possible; here's a vid of someone getting to 1800m.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj-Iwv5NJKg

wow that's really cool. I had only seen the "Iron Man" style jetpack demonstrations that hover a few feet or the jet suits that I thought usually jump from an airplane but I'd never one of these take off from the ground. Must be a really amazing feeling.

And then it's only two minutes of flight. Drone/model is the most likely scenario in my opinion. Great suggestion. Occam's razor.

The flame seems crazy close to his feet. Is that really safe?

I'm curious, doesn't commercial planes have any equivalent for dash cams? I get that the jetpack man might not have been in direct flight path, but I do know that there are inflight cameras for entertainment purposes in some passenger flights for viewing outside the plane and cameras in the landing gears of newer Airbus planes.

Isn't this an air force problem? An unidentified craft in US airspace... What's the escalation point, between civilian authorities and military if/when something is in the sky that shouldn't be?

That is complicated. Most of the documents with the details seem to be Resticted or Classified.

There is some procedure for the ATC to request military intervention. This process at least used to be slow complciated, and requiring approvals at the highest levels. (Think office of the Secretary of Defense levels). That was pre 9/11 though. I've not come across any good information since then.

Separately, the military can act on its own initiative against potential threats. This is so much simpler that I'm pretty sure it is what gets used in practice. For example, if a plane is heading into DC now, without appropriate permission, the military will initiate the intercept on its own (this particular scenario is documented publicly, but with limited details, obviously). There is no restriction on ATC providing relevant information in such situations. It is even legal for ATC to alert the military of the situation. The alert teams used for these fall under NORAD authority.

Lastly, what happens even more often than that, is that the ATC will ask nearby military planes if it is possible for them to come and take a look at something. Depending on their mission, it is sometimes possible to the military plane to do so. This is nothing out of the ordinary, and ATC can make such requests of any plane, but most airliners are likely to be in to big a hurry for scheduling reasons.

So the thing about LA is that there is a beach... and on that beach there are people with smartphones... and on those smartphones are cameras. What I am trying to say if that is a jetpack it is unlikely to have taken off from the city. Possibly from a boat, although flying jetpack from a boat sounds sketchy.

edit: I was wrong, LAX arrival corridor is inland and takeoff corridor is over the ocean. So this has to have been spotted over the land. See below comment by taneq.

>although flying jetpack from a boat sounds sketchy.

Why? If takeoff fails it's likely to hurt a lot less than over land and if you get hurt your buddies can drive a direct line to within feet of you. Exhaust blast is trivial to solve.

My understanding is after you reach a certain height you might as well land on the ground. There’s a reason why even the biggest dives aren’t that high and see hugely dangerous

I only have an undergraduate level understanding of the physics but, an object falling into water should be comparable to water flowing over an object. There's a certain flow rate at which the flow around the object becomes turbulent instead of laminar, an actual transition point at which point you might as well be hitting concrete.

Nope. Water has a surface that basically applies force relative to how fast you're going. If you go slow the water displaces and nothing happens, if yo slap the water it stings your hand, if you hit the water at terminal velocity you may as well hit concrete because it can't displace fast enough for you to sink so your body decelerates rapidly from terminal velocity to a much slower sink leading to massive amounts of internal damage.

If you're high enough up, you could use a parachute. The water helps when you're at too low of an altitude for a parachute to open.

Arrival traffic at 6k feet is 5-10 miles away from the airport. Someone on a beach with a smartphone is gonna have trouble imaging a human-sized object a mile in the air and 5-10 away.

Just as a reference, 5-10 miles out from LAX would pretty much be an area between the 110 to the 710 freeways. Roughly.

Looking at the map, 11km NW of LAX puts you in the middle of Topanga Park?

I think you are right, LAX landing corridor is inland and take off corridor is over the ocean.

Random thought: could it perhaps be a "balloon" or some sort of modded drone made to look like a dude with jetpack?

People have done stranger things for the lulz.

My son-in-law was flying a shark skin on a drone a month or two ago. (For the record, he's nowhere near LAX...)

Here is a video of a "Superman" drone. Could be something like this, but I doubt this particular one could fly that high:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgACwfl6FBI

So now every RC aircraft is a "drone"?

Sure, why not?

I even have a reason why drone is better: Drone is one syllable, RC Aircraft is four.

technically, a drone has some capability for autonomous flight, at the very least something like the ability to travel from waypoint A to B without human control. at this point the horse has already left the barn; any RC quadcopter is a "drone" as far as the general public is concerned. and to be fair, the sophisticated stability controls on a typical quad makes it a lot more similar to a drone (using the narrow definition) than a fairly primitive RC aircraft.

Probably should add something in about drones must not have an onboard human pilot, or most modern airliners would count as drones. Their autopilots are almost all capable of waypoint to waypoint travel without human control (and often much more).

This argument here is why the ATC controller used the term "UAV" to provide the option.

> technically, a drone has some capability for autonomous flight, at the very least something like the ability to travel from waypoint A to B without human control

I dispute that. Radio controlled target drones predate the [semi] autonomous drones seen today.

The first drone was a radio controlled de Havilland Tiger Moth called Queen Bee. The term 'drone' is a play on that name. Drone bees fly once then die, just as radio controlled airplanes being used as targets for anti-aircraft guns only fly once.

That's kind of what a drone is

Hum... It's supposed to be a mindless agent capable of performing some task, but that's a too last century definition.

Nowadays it's anything that flies... I guess ants would be amazed by that definition if they weren't so individually mindless.

In aviation in particular, "drone" used to connotative an armed military UAV. At some point the term morphed, and now it does indeed seem to be entirely synonymous with the literal definition of "UAV".

How can you distinguish a drone from a an RC aircraft during flight?

Well, "crypto" is an energy-intensive store of value and "phones" are internet access terminals, so why not?

I get grumpy about semantic drift, too, a consequence of age.

The original drone was a [full sized, not scale model] RC aircraft.

This reminds me of the weird incident where a guy attached some weather balloons to his chair and landed at LA airport: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawnchair_Larry_flight

Was it the Flying Frenchman Frankie Zapata? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UbOG0ERCwM

Are there any photos or even video of the rocket man?

>someone in a jetpack on Wednesday at 6,000ft (1,829m), seven miles (11km)

Is technology for such jetpack even possible already?!

It will probably never be possible.

Sure having fun with a jet of water is possible but having a super hot jet engine on your back? not sure about that.

EDIT: I just saw that dubai video. Uh it's possible but I would be surprised if it becomes a thing since the flight time was only 2 minutes.

Gravity Industries in the UK have a working jet pack, although flight time is extremely limited, I think in the order 5-10 minutes, and it isn’t designed to fly at altitude. The founder demonstrated using it for rapid casualty assistance in mountains recently, although I’m dubious about the actual usefulness given the difficulty in actually controlling the thing - it’s more like a paramedic would end up smeared across the mountain themselves than actually assist a casualty in anything but the calmest weather.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gtvCnZqZnxc

> it’s more like a paramedic would end up smeared across the mountain themselves than actually assist a casualty in anything but the calmest weather.

Haha yeah. A chopper with fast ropes is much better and still pretty cool.

70 years ago people saw weird things in the sky and thought they were aliens.

Now we have drones and jet packs, are people more likely to attribute weird atmospheric/light patterns/weather balloons as those?

Now we also have radar and hd cameras, so hopefully this time we'll get to the bottom of this.

70 years ago we had RADAR.

RADAR 70 years ago mistook an incoming attack on Pearl Harbor as a flock of birds (of course there's conspiracy theories about it too). The 70 years ago tech wasn't that good, and the operators interpretation of that data was even worse.

Afaik the men manning that radar station confused the Japanese planes with a formation of B-17s that were scheduled to arrive from approximately that direction, not birds.

You may be right. I'm probably mixing stories of issues with early radar.

RADAR 80 years also kept Britain in the war and helped win the battle of Britain.

I thought they knew the attack was coming due to breaking Purple but couldn't move the ships out because it'd tip their hand that they could read the Japanese transmissions?

I don't have a cite, but I remember reading an article that looked at UFO sightings going back a couple hundred years. People have long (always?) been seeing things in the sky that they could not explain.

What they tend to think they are seeing matches pretty well with what the science fiction of their day uses in stories of the near future (or whatever is the equivalent of science fiction in pre-science fiction times).

So when the first tentative manned balloon flights were starting, and futurists were predicting an upcoming age of airships, people were reporting seeing large dirigibles.

When futurists were saying widespread heavier than air flight was going to be solved and would be widespread in the next couple of decades, people were seeing airplanes.

i dont see real issue here. if they are afraid that landing plane might be hit by him - simply crash a cheap drone into that man, that would strongly discourage him from flying nearby because it hurts a lot

Is that Elon Musk working on his jetpack personal transporter? <grin>

More seriously, if you are so inclined to build your own, here are instructions: https://timwylie.com/files/jetpack/building.pdf

I tried but quickly decided that I wasn't sufficiently motivated.

How do they make their escape? I'm presuming that they are hunted.

It might not be as hard as you might think. Doubtful the only person involved would be the "pilot". Probably some ground support. I could imagine ground support listening to ATC for the inevitable report. Similar to bank robbers. Once the call goes out, you know how long it will take for a response. However, calls to the police about a bank robbery are guaranteed to get an immediate response. Calls to the police to investigate a UFO are probably not going to see the same response. So once you hear the ATC report, you radio your buddy in the jetpack to land, pack up in an SUV, and drive away. Depending on the size of the jetpack, the pilot might even be able to climb into the back of the SUV without taking anything off. It could be feasible even if it was a call to a more motivated FBI. LA traffic sucks.

It was just some good old swamp gas.

Obligatory share: [0] An interesting story onboard an SR-71 Blackbird

[0](https://theaviationgeekclub.com/sr-71-blackbird-pilot-tells-...)

Classic. "Aspen, I show 1,942 knots."

"I'm showing closer to 2000"

"Roger that, your equipment is probably more accurate than ours"

Gets me every time.

That version is succinct, but without color. Here is a longer but also a better telling.[1] That Hornet must die, and die now.

[1] http://b.johnwurth.com/aspen-20/

My calves are burning!

Got to be Elon Musk. Makes too much sense

Anyone checked to see what Tony Stark is doing these days?

> "A jetpack is a device usually strapped to a person's back, which uses jets of gas or liquid to propel the wearer through the air"

Shoddy reporting. I think the author just looked up "jetpack" on the internet without comprehending anything. This jetpack is powered but sets of air breathing jet engines, the kind traditionally used to power modern passenger aircraft.

Perhaps the jetpack in the example video is, but this is not the jetpack that's been flying around LA International Airport, necessarily.

This is probably what the reporter looked up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_pack

Those hydrogen peroxide jetpacks have a flight time of 30 seconds so I doubt that's what this jetpack was since it was seen at 6000ft.

Jet: A collimated stream, spurt or flow of liquid or gas from a pressurized container, an engine, etc.

The 'jet' in 'turbojet' refers to the stream of hot gas coming out of the engine. The 'turbo' in 'turbojet' refers to the turbine. Not all turbine engines are jet engines, and strictly speaking not all jet engines are turbine engines (though by convention 'jet engine' is taken to mean an air breathing turbine engine specifically, excluding rocket engines which also use jets of hot gas for thrust..)

This naming convention is also broken by ramjet and scramjet engines, which breath air and produce jets, but do not have turbines.

This might be the most unnecessary clarification ever made...

I think the story was that there was a flying person not a discussion about the technology. It would all be assumptions anyway as there are not photos or videos of the thing.

This is called mass hysteria. Nice twist on drones though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases

It should be noted that the technology to do this is quite old. The Williams X-Jet was operational about the time the first Intel x86 processor came off the assembly line. The Army evaluated the technology and decided not to use it at that time about 40 years ago. Here are the specs from Wikipedia:

Specifications (X-Jet) Data from[citation needed] General characteristics Crew: 1 Length: 3 ft (0.91 m) approx. Height: 4 ft 0 in (1.22 m) Empty weight: 401 lb (182 kg) Gross weight: 550 lb (249 kg) Powerplant: 1 × Williams F107 turbofan engine, 570 lbf (2.5 kN) thrust (modified) Performance Maximum speed: 52 kn (60 mph, 96 km/h) Endurance: 30–45 minutes Service ceiling: 10,000 ft (3,000 m) Thrust/weight: 1.11

More recent turbofan engines combined with modern computer-assisted controls could result in a considerable boost in capability, particularly in reliability by using multiple smaller turbofans.

Given the extreme irresponsibility Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook have shown in the last few days in censoring important voter information, let us hope someone at Homeland is keeping them from buying advanced turbofan engines: https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/big-tech-in-the-tank-for-defen... https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden... https://nypost.com/2020/10/15/kayleigh-mcenany-twitter-has-m...

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