Jetman wows crowds at Red Bull Air Race
After maybe 25 flights, you get relaxed and it feels amazing. It’s like a magic carpet DAVID MAYMAN Jetpack pilot and company owner
It was a scene straight out of the movies.
Except the man flying over the Abu Dhabi Corniche with nothing but a black backpack and a remote control type device in each hand was not a character from a fictional, high-tech world inhabited by Iron Man or James Bond.
Australian entrepreneur David Mayman took to the skies at speeds of about 95 kilometres an hour as the crowds gathered to watch the 11th Red Bull Air Race World Championship in Abu Dhabi.
Mr Mayman has spent the past 12 years refining the technology for what he describes as the world’s first personal use vertical take-off and landing aircraft.
He demonstrated the latest model of his company’s JB JetPack for the first time in the UAE yesterday.
Wearing a flying jumpsuit, helmet and the jetpack that holds two engines strapped to his back, Mr Mayman flew at a height of about 18 metres over the water, thrilling thousands of spectators who lined the Corniche breakwater.
“I was like, ‘It looks like a drone’,” said Netanye Nash, a 30-year-old South African teacher who watched from shore.
“And I was like, ‘No, it’s a man, and he’s flying’,” said Zeenat Patel, 37, also a South African teacher.
“In what times are we living now where people are actually flying in front of us? Who would have thought that you could fly by yourself, not in a plane?”
Mr Mayman said he has been fascinated with flying ever since he learnt to pilot a fixed-wing aircraft at the age of 16. He later went on to fly helicopters.
“But I always had a dream about vertical take-off and landing,” said Mr Mayman, 54, chief executive and principal pilot of JetPack Aviation.
“It starts off as being really frightening,” Mr Mayman said of the experience.
“There’s a lot of power, you’re talking about the power of a Nascar or Formula One car that’s sitting on your back. You can feel that. And then after maybe 25 flights, you get relaxed and it feels amazing, it’s like a magic carpet. It’s very balanced, it’s very stable and as you accelerate, the world just disappears.”
The Jet Pack Man was one of several acts at the annual air race staged over the Corniche.
As well as the Abu Dhabi air race, the first in a series of eight Red Bull Air Races held around the world each year, there was a performance by the Red Bull Skydive Team Wing Suit Jump, acrobatic jets from the Al Fursan team and Pal Takats Paramotor Aerobatics took turns entertaining the crowds between the races.
Mr Mayman said he followed his dream when he sold his software company and decided to focus on developing the technology to power the vertical aircraft for personal use.
He successfully tested the first prototype designed by his company 12 years ago.
The latest version of the jetpack is a long way from the models he tested years ago.
“It’s got smaller but also far more sophisticated,” Mr Mayman said. “Twelve years ago there were massive engines and they didn’t work very well because of the technology. They were very inefficient, they used a lot of fuel. Frankly, they weren’t very safe.”
A challenge for the engineers was making the two or four engines that powered a jetpack start simultaneously and operate in co-ordination.
“What would happen then is the jetpack would either try to roll one way or try to roll forward or you could have a flameout, in which case you lose thrust completely from one of the engines,” he said.
Testing the jetpacks is done on a tethered line supported by two beams. But when he flies in public demonstrations, there is no safety mechanism in place should anything go awry.
“The one thing that we need to incorporate is a safety system that can work at any altitude,” Mr Mayman said.
“We don’t run a safety system at the moment. It’s really expensive to do well. There are lots of off-the-shelf parachute systems that we could buy, but we want to build it from the ground up, that’s a key hurdle that we need to get through.”