LE ROCKETMAN
On Thursday he’ll attempt to cross the Channel on his 120mph homemade jet-powered ‘tea tray’. Just one problem: will French elf ‘n’ safety busybodies bring him crashing down to earth?
THE trouble with the French, as George W. Bush once (supposedly) joked, is that they don’t even have a word for entrepreneur. Take, for example, the mind-bogglingly hostile treatment that a Gallic businessman called Franky Zapata is currently experiencing at the hands of his nation’s legendary army of moustache-twiddling bureaucrats.
Mr Zapata, a 40-year-old inventor, will this Thursday attempt to fly into the record books by becoming the first person in human history to zoom across the Channel aboard a jet-powered ‘hover-board’.
The state-of-the-art device, which he built from scratch, resembles a sort of souped-up tea tray and can propel its driver through thin air at speeds of up to 120mph and reach an altitude of 10,000 feet.
It was inspired by the flying suit worn by the lead character in the superhero movie Iron Man, and is powered by five turbojet engines. He hopes it will one day enter commercial production, as a revolutionary piece of military hardware.
Only last week, the Flyboard Air, to use its proper name, was wowing crowds at France’s annual Bastille day Parade, where Zapata zoomed through the air 50ft above Paris’s Place de la Concorde, kitted out in a soldier’s uniform and brandishing a rifle.
In 48 hours’ time, the daredevil hopes to demonstrate the true potential of his extraordinary invention by negotiating the roughly 21-mile crossing from Sangatte near Calais to St Margaret’s Bay in Kent. Standing on his flying tea tray all the way.
‘When you fly with your body, even your hands affect the direction you want to go in,’ he said. ‘You feel the turbulence and the air through your fingers. It’s like becoming a bird. But it’s also very hard. I have to fight against the wind with my legs so there’s pain too. It’s not as peaceful as it looks.’
Zapata’s record-breaking bid to become the first man to cross unassisted on a jet-powered device should take around 25 minutes, during which he’ll soar above the Strait of dover at a height of between 50 and 200 feet.
Yet this triumph of modern engineering, not to mention old-fashioned derring- do, has been thrown needlessly into doubt by the stuffed shirts of France’s maritime prefecture, bureaucrats who hold official sway over his country’s portion of the Channel.
Citing health and safety, they have said an unceremonious ‘non’ to Zapata’s plans to station a refuelling vessel for his device in French waters.
AS a result, the dashing inventor will have to travel all the way into Britain’s portion of the Channel (where officialdom seems to be more lenient) before he can refill his backpack with kerosene.
All of which is, at best, a big ask: current models of the Flyboard Air can only stay airborne for about ten minutes on a single tank of fuel. And that’s only just sufficient to cross into the UK’s seas.
‘This has made the challenge ten times more difficult,’ Zapata told Le Parisien newspaper. ‘ It’s a completely arbitrary and unjustified decision . . . It won’t be easy at all, and I give it a 30 per cent chance of succeeding.’
France’s maritime officials are unmoved, with a spokesman insisting: ‘ The crossing is extremely dangerous given the traffic in the Channel, one of the busiest straits in the world.’ Be
that as it may, may La Manche, Manche as the French call it, has been crossed by countless lard-coated swimmers, along with adventurous souls travelling in everything from a bathtub to a rubber dinghy. It was even negotiated by a weird amphibious car with Richard Branson at its wheel back in 2004.
Killjoy bureaucrats did nothing to rain on their parade. However, Zapata appears to boast serious form when it comes to picking fights with the authorities.
A former military reservist and professional jet- ski racer, he launched his eponymous company just over a decade ago, after coming up with the idea of using water propelled via a hose from the exhaust of a jet- ski to power an aerial device.
From this he created the Flyboard, as opposed to the Flyboard Air he plans to cross the Channel on, which can blast riders roughly 30ft above the waves, and allow them to perform somersaults and other tricks, using water propulsion sion fo for power. It has been in commercial production for several years now and is popular among thrill- seeking holidaymakers across the world.
With one hit product under the belt of his jumpsuit, Zapata has spent the past four years developing a device that does not need to be connected to a jet-ski, so can operate over both land and sea.
The result is the Flyboard Air, which is operated via a small joystick, and whose rider must maintain a rigid body position while using small movements to help steer or alter the trajectory.
‘I was inspired by my passion for superhero movies and comics to get as close as possible to Iron Man, of whom I was a fan,’ he said.
He trialled prototypes over the sea near his company’s HQ in Marseille, and in March 2016 broke a Guinness World Record by using his Flyboard Air to travel more than 7,388ft off the coastal town of Sausset-les-Pins. News of the testing process soon reached the authorities, however. In 2017, Zapata found himself facing prosecution by France’s Civil Aviation Authority, which claimed the device was technically an aircraft and was therefore breaking rules regarding minimum flying heights over populated areas.
SO In response, Zapata launched a furious tirade on Facebook, expressing his ‘disgust’ at the attitude Gallic authorities were displaying towards his enterprise.
‘I am certainly going to be forced, with the greatest regret, to leave France. I just feel sick for the potential that will be lost for my country. That is how innovators are treated in our country.’
Zapata rejected demands that, in order to comply with health and safety laws, he restrict testing to a secure military area or inside an enormous cage.
‘No one would be able to come and see me and film me. You
can imagine that I didn’t create this machine to fly in a cage,’ he added.
In the end, prosecutors backed down, and his firm and its dozens of employees stayed put. He has since flown the Flyboard Air across miles of the Arizona desert, with stunning footage of the stunt currently adorning his website.
Perhaps ironically, given this episode, Zapata was given a grant last december of some €1.4 million (£1.26 million) by France’s Ministry of defence, which believes his device could in future be put to good use in a military setting.
‘If the question is do I think I will sell this to special forces all over the world, the answer is yes. When? I don’t know,’ he says.
As to whether Joe Public will one day be putting the device to everyday use, Zapata is less sure.
‘The problem with this machine is if you’re not calm you can break your neck,’ he explained recently. ‘You have to be focused. It’s not a skateboard. It’s a flying machine.’