I don't know how many of you remember the introduction of this, as long as I'm not sure if I remember it myself, but mind that finally the Martin Jetpack has reached commercial availability. A little humor never hurts, so this will surely suit the likes of you that like flying completely private, not having to see any pilot, or other crew whatsoever, but also for the ones that really want to make an appearance at a show or red carpet.

I can only imagine the jokes on 'park this for me' and don't scratch it, but now let us get to the technical parts. The Martin jetpack is basically powered by two fans about the size of a small washing machine that are strapped to the harness and rig the user has to strap to their back.

The engine power on this is a two-liter V4 engine capable of serving 200 horse power, or 150kW, but the fact that it has a two-stroke architecture first got me worried, until I remembered that aeromodels that I used to build once also used two-stroke engines.

With an excellent flight time of 30 minutes, the Martin Jetpack also ensures its users won't suffer injury, or worse, as it packs a bunch of redundancy systems to make sure that user error doesn't turn fatal. One redundancy that I can think of would be some automatic drop in height, to reach a safe distance from where the user won't suffer if the engine stops. I have to wonder about the weight of this, as regarding the landing gear, and knowing that the rotors are made of a composite carbon/Kevlar material.

With common gasoline as the fuel, customers won't have to go down at airports to refill, but will surely have to get used to people staring at gas stations. Pricing for this is no less than $86,000.


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