Could You Be Rescued By Jetpack?

It does make a lot of sense (I think, but then, what do I know) for fast/first response stuff.

You have to celebrate the sheer bloodymindedness of the bloke who developed this. Looks pretty stable in flight, which is quite something.

It’s a very cool thing, as long as it can also carry the equipment the paramedic needs (the most obvious things being a defibrillator and o2), and you know exactly where the casualty is, as there isn’t a lot of fuel for searching. Be interested to see what the time saving adds up to when you include the usual response time for MRTs (and in this case members who are trained to fly) to assemble, reach the foot of the hill and in this case, suit up and carry out pre-flight checks.

Sadly, it will probably come down to a cost/benefit thing for individual teams. Are there enough cases in which providing this kind of pre-hospital care after 1hr rather than 2hrs will actually save life or prevent significant disability? The survivability of cardiac arrest on the summit of Helvellyn I don’t think will change (the fatality rate is extremely high, even when it happens in Tescos.) Could make a massive difference for someone who has a stroke in the mountains.

the fatality rate is extremely high, even when it happens in Tescos.

This is true, it’s probably in the region of 10% survival overall but actually if it happens in public higher it’s a bit than this. If your local Tesco has a defib and someone knows how to use it, you can imagine it might be higher still. OTOH, survival from a collapse on Helvellyn presumably lower.

Survival with CPR ongoing reduces by an estimated 3-5% per minute delay to defibrillation. So actually, if you’re walking the hills and your mates know CPR, maybe the RocketMan can come to your rescue. Arguably worth a try. I’d also be interested to see whether a nationwide drone-delivered defib service would work. At a minimum, this is an interesting and cool experiment that will provide some useful data.

I provided a bit of MTB action for a Boxxe ad that had Richard in a few months back. Didn’t get to meet him and try out the pack unfortunately!

Is there any kind of redundancy on those jet packs? If the engine fails then you are crashing presumably?

I wouldn’t trust it. I have more hours of practice at jetpack rescue than I can shake a joystick at and I’ll tell you more, 90%+ of my efforts ended in death.

call me a cynic, but there have been quite a few of these “Jetpack future soldier” videos around. I think the same guy, dressed up in various uniforms representing whoever he’s trying to sell it to in the moment.

Having said that. Hes got a working jetpack so more fool me.

I suspect its likely to be one of those things that works as an idea, but by the time youve taken into account safety, redundency, training, cost, it doesnt really…. get off the ground.

maybe.

maybe im wrong.
maybe there will be one parked up in every mountain rescue centre, next to the defib and the landrover, in 10 yrs time.

seems there are simpler solutions though. Im surprised that manned multirotors are not more of a thing.

this thing is a hexacopter, with dual motors and props on each arm, so plenty of redundancy. multirotors are held up by software anyway right? so programming in redundency in case of rotor failiure should be fairly straight forward?

pressumably though you can generally glide a plane if needs be, and autorotate a helicopter, where as a failed multirotor becomes a brick with excessive/unnatural elevation pretty quickly? (much like jet pack guy)

Having said that. Hes got a working jetpack so more fool me.

Thing is if he sold them to your average school run parent he’d only have needed to point out that the yellow zig zags genuinely don’t apply to a jet pack and he’d have flogged loads

I think this is a terrible idea and will permanently spoil the wild places where we go to enjoy ourselves.

How could it permanently spoil wild places?

The chances of getting this approved for civilian use in open airspace are about zero. It only take a catastrophic failure of one turbine for it to fall out the sky and there’s almost no redundancy in the propulsion or control systems – the consequential damage liability would be huge that few businesses/operators would want to carry. Only probable use in some sort of sneaky beaky special forces malarkey.

Here at least (North Vancouver, BC), all the mountain bike trails are under VERY heavy tree canopy which is gonna make landing one of those very interesting…
So, possibly a good idea in some areas but I doubt our local SAR team would find them useful…