Like other commenters, I agree that this is roughly equal parts awesome (because flying suits are awesome, and also because rapid response from medical professionals in the field is too), equal parts silly/gimmicky/unlikely.
Also, why is the BBC feeling a need to put quotes around "fly" in the article? If a person is, like, lifting off from the ground, and moving through the air in a controlled fashion driven by jet engines, isn't that pretty exactly flying, without quotes?
> Also, why is the BBC feeling a need to put quotes around "fly" in the article?
The BBC is fastidious about quoting. It's a good thing. They don't report that 'man killed by a speeding car' - instead they report 'man "killed by a speeding car"' because they're quoting their source that told them what happened, not telling you what happened themselves because they weren't there and don't know that.
> If a person is, like, lifting off from the ground, and moving through the air in a controlled fashion driven by jet engines, isn't that pretty exactly flying?
It depends, are they reaching a height where the Wing-in-ground effect is negligible? If they have to stay below that, then no, not really flying. Unless you'd say that a hovercraft or ekranoplan also flies.
Or they could just be staying low because it might be insanely dangerous if the operator loses control at even slight altitude.
Where did you get this idea of flying? I wondered if I had a misconception there but any source I could quickly find on the web disagrees with the "can move with six degrees of freedom" definition and uses a definition like "doesn't touch ground or sea while moving through the air" instead. (Wikipedia on "Flight" / "Ekranoplan" / "Ground-effect vehicle", Merriam Webster on the word "Flight", and search for "what is flight" if that's not enough).
Up to a max altitude of 7 meters (at best), sure, an Ekranoplan has got all the degrees of freedom that other aircraft have, Which as was pointed out here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24629545 , is not 6
Imho no, an Ekranoplan does not fly freely. Nothing to do with a bogus DOF count though
The only reason an Ekranoplan can't fly higher is it's wings don't generate enough lift out of ground effect. Load a 747 up high enough, and it too wouldn't be able to get out of ground effect, but I'd still say it was flying.
You can't just say that "because it's a 747, it can fly":
A 747 with no fuel can't take off and fly.
A 747 with so much load that it never takes off at all, can't fly.
And IMHO, a 747 with just so much load that it can barely take off but can't get out of ground effect, also can't fly. It's borderline, but not really.
It's an academic distinction though. Give the 747 a while, and it will burn enough fuel to lighten and ascend.
It seems that you don't understand the implication of the DOF count. Flying means moving freely through the air. That, colloquially, means 6degree of freedom movement through space. It means looping a, it means barrel rolls, it means it can run circles and go backwards and move upside down. You know, flying.
Ekranoplans fly as much as an hovercraft does, which mean they don't. Case in point: they are unable to do 6dof movement. An ekranoplan doesn't do barrel rolls for example.
I guess I'm confused. If an aircraft can't go backwards or do a loop, does that mean it's not flying? Because as far as I know, every fixed wing aircraft is incapable of going in reverse, and most can't do a loop. Not trying to pick on your defenition of flight based on degrees of freedom, but that doesn't seem to match any definition of flight I've run across.
Pretty cool usage scenario, since everyone can imagine a flying hero coming in to save the day. That being said, this feels like a solution looking for a problem. I am sure there are specific areas of responsibility that would benefit from a rapidly deployable single medic carrying a small triage kit with no patient return capability, but they are probably few and far between (especially when you factor in the above need with the capability to purchase, train crew, and maintain such a capability).
As a pilot of a helicopter whose purpose is search and rescue, this system seems a bit cumbersome. Yes, a helicopter can't land in all terrain types, but it is a pretty well established skill set to have medics lowered to survivors, and to have the capability to hoist and then transport survivors to higher level care. Maintaining this capability is expensive, which is why it is usually limited to public safety organizations, though some operators like Air Zermatt are private. While a jetpack medic might be able to compete with a subset up the capabilities of a hoist capable medevac helicopter, it won't have the range, speed, or full spectrum of services. If you end up needing a helicopter to evacuate the person anyways, you probably didn't gain a whole lot by having a jetpack medic fly out there first. Unless the jetpack bases are highly concentrated and very common in an area, they probably won't have a time advantage when it comes to onscene arrival either.
It sort of depends a bit on cost and a bit on how one operates it doesn't it?
Operations costs on a rescue helicopter can be $1500 - $5000/hr based on publicly available data. What is more, large helicopters can do harm with their down wash. So if you can have a suit, or two, or three sitting in the closet on standby then the cost to respond quickly to one of these events can be much lower than the cost of calling in a helicopter.
Clearly the amount of gear you can carry to the scene is minimal, but you can get an able bodied first aid technician there faster than hiking in and faster than calling in a helicopter, loading up the tech, flying to the location, and lowering them to the ground. Not to mention the challenges of wind effects in wooded terrain where the helicopter pilot and the technician in the rescue basket are essentially in two different wind regimes.
Then there are the TCO costs, what does it cost to own a helicopter versus say 5 flying suits? If the helicopter is down for maintenance you're stuck, but if a suit is down you still have 4 suits ready to go right? That lowers your risk of not having the capability when you need it. How much? Hard to say without knowing the maintenance regimen of the suits but it seems likely the suits would be more resilience against 100% loss of capability.
Well I think the question becomes, what sort of situations are actually happening, and then what capability is needed to mitigate those situations? If an area's data says that there are enough people whose position we know, but because they didn't get rapid, low level stabalizing triage care they ended up dying then a system like this might make sense. But if most of the cases involve searching, higher level care, an eventual medevac anyways, or any combination of the above, a SAR organization is probably going to need a helicopter anyways. If you already have a helicopter with hoist capability, then it will probably be hard to make the math justify the additional expense.
While having a smaller fleet of helicopters induces a smaller number of critical failures, if the advantage is the amount of time it takes to get to a location, you'd need a lot of jetpacks to be spread out enough to beat a helicopter. With an advertised endurance of 5-10 minutes, this won't do more than get you a small hop to a remote location. The searching and most of the traversing is going to have to be done by some other vehicle. If every 4x4,truck or ground search party needs to have one of these (and be trained to operate it proficiently), I have a hard time believing that you aren't going to be quickly running an operation that's more expensive then a helo operation. That being said, maybe some areas could use this. Perhaps a place with canyons or cravasses, where people could fall down but rescuers could still mostly move rapidly using ground vehicles.
As far as the downwash, while it is a concern it's also something that can be managed. The heavier the aircraft (more equipment, endurance, and reliability) , the more downwash. This jetpack has a small down wash footprint (but I bet it's still really high under the jets since it's a pure thrust aircraft) but the tradeoff is in endurance and equipment.
But again, there might be some areas that could benefit from it, but I think it's a solution looking for a problem. Other than the gee wiz factor, I doubt any of the SAR agencies in the US would set up a system like this.
I don't disagree, and the same conversation happened when helicopters were first considered for SAR operations. My reading of your comment was that you dismissed as unlikely any application of the jet suits in a SAR role and I don't agree that there is no place or situation where these things make more sense than a helicopter. I was hoping to describe the parameters around where they would make sense.
What's cool about the history of helicopters is that people immediately recognized the ability of a helicopter to save lives, and then they promptly started doing so. The first helicopter flight was 1939,and the USCG's first life saved with a helo was 1944 with the delivery of blood plasma. So who knows, maybe this will pan out and with a few years folks with start saving lives with this technology.
I don't want to say that there isn't any application of this tool in a Sar role, but I don't think that this tool is any better than what organizations currently have available. It isn't a game changer, and it isn't going to save lives that would have otherwise been lost. If you wanted to save lives of hikers, you'd spend $400k on personal locator beacons and let people snag them at a ranger station for their hike. That would save more lives than a fancy suit I bet. While I can see there is a scenario where first responders say "wow I'm glad we had the jet pack in the back of the truck" I don't see it being worth the effort to get an agency to the point where every truck and crew has that capability without sacrificing any other capability.
Hey, serious question related to this since you have a search/rescue background. How would you find the survivor in a mountainous area? Don't you have to use a helicopter anyways or if it's a ground party... wouldn't the whole jetpack thing be redundant 90% of the time since someone is already there?
I don't know the economics to search/rescue problems all that well, but I've always understood that the budget is essentially never enough. With such strained budgets, does it make sense to have something so niche and expensive? It's not like these things are going to be maintenance, license and cert free if implemented to a life saving capacity.
My experience is focused on finding people over water, but a lot of the tools will be the same. Using NVGs if we're at night to pick up any sort of light, our electro optical sensor that has thermal imaging capability, and good old fashioned headwork for guessing where a survivor might be located over terrain. A helicopter isn't always going to be the only airborne search asset, so it's possible to imagine a fixed wing search asset locating a survivor, and then a jetpack medic getting to them to provide triage care. The economics of search and rescue are really tricky, and it's expensive to maintain such a specialized capability with a profit motive in mind. I don't know the specifics of the UKs SAR system, but I am pretty sure they have a civilian organization running their maratime search and rescue, but I don't know if the bill is footed entirely by the government. Was your economics question about the jet pack or helicopter based search and rescue?
I agree that a jet pack isn’t as useful as a helicopter, but they are way, way cheaper. Medical helicopters cost millions of dollars and require expensive fuel and highly trained pilots. Jetpacks cost $100-300k, use a fraction of the fuel, and can be flown with a sports pilot license (much easier to acquire and maintain).
Good points, but remember we can't only compare the initial capital outlay, we have to compare the hourly operating cost. I imagine that it isn't quite as cheap as you think, and we would also need to see sustained operations from these jetpack to know what the hourly flight time cost is. This is amplified if you need 10 to 20 jetpack to cover and area that could be serviced by two helicopters that are being leased under a maintenance contract. As far as the pilot requirements, sure a jetpack might be able to be just a sport pilot, but can they operate in a commercial capablity then? The FAA says no. Also, this probably isn't trivial operations (search and rescue is highly dynamic, especially in mountainous, maritime, urban or poor weather conditions. On paper my flight experience is 500 hours and a commercial license, which isn't that hard to get as a rotary wing pilot. But in actuality it's 500 hours of highly expensive military flying in dangerous environments, to the tune of well over a million dollars of initial training. Just like a commercial EMS operator isn't going to hand the keys to a helicopter to anyone with a commercial rotary license, are you really going to have a jetpack medic be someone with the bare minimum of certification?
>I agree that a jet pack isn’t as useful as a helicopter, but they are way, way cheaper. Medical helicopters cost millions of dollars and require expensive fuel and highly trained pilots. Jetpacks cost $100-300k, use a fraction of the fuel, and can be flown with a sports pilot license (much easier to acquire and maintain).
I'm not so sure I buy this. Maybe if you compare a jetpack with a helicopter capable of winching out the patient. But small 2 person helicopters are available new for the low 100s of thousands. I suspect they're more fuel efficient than a jet pack, but I don't have anything to back that up.
So... how is this better than a rescue helicopter with a basket (like the US Coast Guard)? Helicopter in an EMT to go down with the basket, stabilize the victim, place victim in the basket, retract, fly away (yes, I know, there's more to it). With this setup up, fly in with super limited resources and stabilize the victim to wait for a helicopter for exfil? Super rapid response, maybe, but search/rescue is also pretty limited in manpower, not just equipment... and limited on money. Unless you have extra staging locations peppered throughout, all these jetpackers are probably going to be based with the rescue birds anyways, which defeats the purpose. Plus, imagine the cost for the extra training, keeping up with certs, quals, maintenance, and oh dear God... the insurance costs... for a severely neutered helicopter. Probably best to spend the cash on an extra bird to fan out coverage.
I'm smelling solutionism... It's kind of like that boat "take over" gimmick without a weapon in hand. The enemy force will literally just yell out how many points they're racking up when shooting at a bunch of guys in jetpacks with their hands occupied in not-weaponry. Afterwards, they'll agree not to kill hostages as long as more jetpack guys are sent in for target practice. That whole PR stunt was a complete joke.
Damn, when I was a kid, jetpacks were the coolest idea ever. As they become more of a reality, they're so useless other than for fun.
Even helicopters can take a while to get on station, and typically come from much further away.
While I agree this looks gimmicky, I wonder if they can station many more jetpacks (much cheaper than a helicopter) much closer (ie. every mountain rescue station has one) than a helicopter.
The survival likelihood for EMT callouts drops really quickly as time progresses, so getting there quickly for initial triage and stabilization is more important than getting complex equipment there. They could stabilize and then radio for either a 4x4 or helicopter, using resources appropriate to the situation.
The UK is tiny compared to the US, and 'mountain rescue' is very different compared to the US as well.
I've seen Richard Browning fly this in person — he did a demo a couple of years ago at San Diego Comic-Con. It's unreal to watch, but it's definitely something I can see not being all that widespread: it takes a lot of training to acclimate to it.
Browning's been doing a bunch of demos lately: it feels like they're trying to figure out the best use, whether that's military applications, rescue, or others. This isn't the first rescue demo, although this one looks like it's a bit more useful than the other one (which was disaster response, and which very much looked like a publicity stunt.)
> I've seen Richard Browning fly this in person — he did a demo
> Browning's been doing a bunch of demos lately
How many other people have been trained to fly this thing? It's telling if it's no-one, that would mean that it's likely prohibitive to insure the danger.
And you notice something interesting in the beginning... this guy is in GOOD shape. Like not just good, we're talking REALLY good, he's in the 0.1percentile, being able to do some pretty difficult callisthenic moves (go to 1:00 in the video to see him doing handstand pushups and flags, these can take years to learn for the common person). And I think it's one of the reasons he made the suit work... because I can't imagine someone NOT being that fit arriving to a working design, given the iterations it required to get everything right in the beginning.
However, I think we can now arrive to a design for the common man thanks to him having iterated through these first versions.
it seems most trust is in arms? Correct me if i am wrong.
If so this is equivalent to hanging off a bar (the forces are in opposite direction though).
That is certainly not an easy to maintain for long. If one arm gets tired and you cant land you are in big trouble.
Also a strong wind gust might be outright deadly.
I've seen a few videos of youtubers (Colin Furze, the Hacksmith) taking classes to learn to fly it; it looks like it doesn't take more than a few days to learn, but a massive amount of physical strength to fly.
Seems to me like little more than a cheap publicity stunt for fundraising.
I thought the number one rule for First Responders was not to cause injury (on the scene or en-route) to yourself or bystanders and not to cause further injury to the casualty.
A "paramedic jet suit" just seems to be waiting for an opportunity for the paramedic to become a statistic as they fly head-first into rocky substance. Then I suppose we will be expected to all feel sorry and cry for the terrible loss of this heroic first responder ... despite the idiotic risks they took.
Scrambling to reach someone over difficult terrain also carries risk to life. As does being unable to reach patients for 90 minutes whatever the emergency.
Helicopters can reach people in this location just fine in a reasonable time, and more importantly bring people back. Limiting your comparison to a 400,000+$ experimental jet suit vs walking is deceptive.
If cost that much of an issue, a paraglider costs 1/10th as much and are likely much safer to operate. Or if getting a single person on site is all you need, tiny helicopters cost as low as 50k new.
There are plenty of cases here in Australia, including recently, where people have fallen off a cliff and can't be reached by rescuers for hours or perhaps until the next day.
When that happens, it seems to be because the location (bottom of cliff) has extensive bush covering around it.
That being said, I know nothing at all about any of the above cases. There may have been bad weather involved too, which would probably also be a problem for a jet pack solution.
The geography of the area is such that a person can walk to these people in 90 minutes. A jet suit with a slightly different design might be a meaningfully better option for rescuing people climbing el capitan or the bottom of ravines, but that’s not what is being considered here.
Rain? High winds? I doubt a 250 pound dude in a jetpack is going to fair any better than 15,000 pound copter.
Tight areas... maybe. But if the tree canopy is too tight, I don't see how a dude with a jetpack is truly going to navigate that efficiently. They'll just find a near by clearing to land and hoof over... which, the same can be said of someone in a copter. Though, the one from the copter can ruck 70+ pounds of life saving medical equipment because they're not carrying jetpack equipment.
Forest Fires? I mean, what advantage do they have to smokejumpers? All that extra jetpack gear means less firefighting gear on them.
Look, it's cool. It's awesome. I also want to be the first person to get a DUI in a jetpack. But for the price of a cheap helicopter and going to a scenario such as a fell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fell)... a less complex helicopter that can ACTUALLY carry gear seems like the smarter investment for a search/rescue department.
Clarified, as reach people in this area just fine. It might be interesting to look at this kind of jet suit for rock climbers, but this specific design doesn’t seem capable of that.
A medivac out of the Grand Canyon can cost $15k. If you could use a $400k jet pack to
stabilize someone until a ground crew gets there it could be a win for everyone.
Multi million dollar helicopters large enough to remove people from the grand cannon plus a crew cost 15k per flight. A single person helicopter’s cost as low as 50k brand new and thus less per flight than this thing.
> I suspect people probably said the same thing the first time they saw a helicopter!
Odds are that they would have been right - early helicopters probably weren't safe enough to use as ambulances.
Well-run modern air ambulances are very safe edit: perhaps not, see replies (twin-engine helicopters with very experienced pilots) and can serve hundreds of patients per year, generally only serving very urgent cases of course. [0]
My question for the jet-pack folks is why not use a helicopter? Presumably the suit is a great deal cheaper, but are there any other advantages? Curiously the article doesn't mention helicopters at all, but in the video, they did their interview in front of one.
A friend of mine has been an emergency doctor since 1990. A helicopter crashed with him on board once, killing the patient and causing him injuries that still can be seen after twenty years.
His comment: "We are ready to take risks. That is part of our work, just like cops' or soldiers'. Some missions are extra risky - industrial accidents or anything involved drugged or drunk people. We still take that risk."
IDK what the hazards of a first generation jetpack are, but odds are he would try it out eagerly.
Probably just US, it would be hard to compile such data globally.
I dropped my friend a line and he answered back with a detailed description of his helo accident. It was one helluva freakish story.
They loaded an older lady in a hilly, wooded area not quite close to Ostrava (the largest city in the region, my birthplace). She had symptoms of a serious stroke, it was 1998, no one really expected her to live long, but not that short either.
A few minutes into the flight something (a nut?) exploded in the rotor and they went down like a stone. Very, very hard crash, still in a hilly, wooded area, but close to a big water reservoir, an artificial lake.
The lady died on impact. All other people on board survived with serious injuries, but they were saved by an unbelievable coincidence. A mine rescue team from Ostrava had a regular training on the lake and the helicopter crashed in their sight, less than a kilometer away. So they were there in like 3 minutes, dragged them to safety and put the burning wreck out.
If this was a movie, it would look totally unrealistic. But it happened.
Three months of rehabilitation and friend's lower back is still bad. He cannot stand completely upright, tilts slightly to a side.
If they survived the crash, it probably was something necessitated an auto rotation, rather than the main rotor departing the helicopter. If that happened they would almost certainly be dead. If the nut on the top of the rotor mast detached - called the Jesus nut - they would also be dead. Mast bumping probably wasn't the cause either since that is a problem mostly constrained to a type of rotor system that wouldn't typically be used in an air ambulance setting. I'm not sure if I know of any helicopters with an underslung rotor system that are used by EMS operators.
>Seems to me like little more than a cheap publicity stunt for fundraising.
Having volunteered as a first responder in the White Mountains of New England and with a few friends who dealt with mountain rescues, particularly winter mountain rescues, I strongly disagree with you. There are plenty of places where there are significant numbers of people hiking/climbing/skiing/snowboarding, a vertical range of <6000', horizontal distance of just a mile or two, and yet it can easily take hours from the nearest road/building to reach someone on foot (with no vehicle travel possible and even helicopters often infeasible plus based from quite a distance away). While something like this could turn that into minutes. And going by foot, as well as extracting people, isn't without significant risk too many times of the year (particularly if you're trying to move quickly).
Yes, no doubt this will need significant refinement (just like helicopters). There may be much better possible designs, as well as numerous improvements to be made in terms of auto control. Heck, rather then suits maybe one of those flying platforms or a big drone someone can hang from make more sense. But the idea of getting a few rescuers with some basic kit to an accident high up on a mountain in a matter of minutes with the ability to do an aerial survey/search as they come in? There is nothing gimmicky about it. Minutes let alone hours save people.
>I thought the number one rule for First Responders was not to cause injury (on the scene or en-route) to yourself or bystanders and not to cause further injury to the casualty.
Wilderness rescue is inherently risky, but for that matter so is medical work in general. The goal is certainly to have a large net improvement in overall wellness, so they don't want people, particularly not First Responders which means relatively little training, rush into dangerous situations and cause more trouble for everyone. But somebody using something like this, or doing wilderness rescue at all, is going to be trained beyond that level. And intelligent weighing of risks based on level of training and equipment is core to the entire mission.
>Then I suppose we will be expected to all feel sorry and cry for the terrible loss of this heroic first responder ... despite the idiotic risks they took.
I'm curious, in your experience what is the delay between: knowing there's a need for a response - knowing where the individual is - getting someone on scene? I'm not familiar with mtn rescue so I'm not sure how long it takes vertical surface teams to get into place once the survivor has been located. I'm sure there are times where a vertical surface rescue will be required, but it takes a long time for the team to get positioned. In a situation like that, is it a significant gain to get a medic to that person even if it will be hours before they can get extracted?
I am wondering if you could use this technology to create a hovercraft like vehicle that anybody could drive around, maybe pickup the victim. If the flight altitude and speeds are low a computer could handle all the tricky parts and the driver would just point the direction, in case of problems it would land in a few seconds (maybe this exists already but are not popular)
It doesn’t mention pricing but I would imagine these would be significantly cheaper than a helicopter. If each mountain rescue team could have their own then that would really help.
I think right now they're like $440,000 [1] which is comparable with cheap helicopters (if not more expensive), but far lower than the average helicopter.
They go over that. The idea is that the air ambulance can't necessarily land that close to the patient, the jetsuit can allow the medic to cover severe terrain rapidly between the helicopter and the patient; ditto for terrestrial ambulances trying to reach patients over difficult terrain.
Thanks for the info, makes sense! Can I ask where they go over this? I've already read the article and watched the video multiple times but somehow I'm still not seeing where they discuss this.
It looks like a paraglider requires a minimum of 30 yards of runway to take off and land (assuming there's nothing obstructing it at the end of those 30 yards, like trees), with some pilots suggesting 150 yards without tall trees to safely take off. I could see that being an issue in a lot of areas, especially mountainous areas where flat areas are only in the valley.
That said, I don't have any personal experience with paragliders, so perhaps there are VTOL options?
Take off requires a cliff or small runway depending on wind conditions, but you can do a pinpoint landing just like a parachute, which seems to be the concern. I suspect they are going to be walking back either way to keep an eye on the injured person.
I love how every piece of new tech from robots, to drones to jet packs is sold as helping disaster relief and first responders. But then is actually actually adopted by the military to kill people.
I always figured we saw the technology with disaster relief and first responders because of the military development not panning out as expected and companies seeking to recoup investment.
we don't see a lot of military programs until long after they have either been shut down or morphed into something new.
everything kills, people just need to recognize the simple fact that that government which can provide you with roads, water, health care, and more, has the same power to deprive you and others of the same. the trouble is finding politicians who appeal to your sense of helping others and not in electing them to do unto others.
As other commenters pointed out, this looks like a total publicity stunt. Surely it would be safer and more practical to use drones to deliver equipment/supplies with remote medical specialists advising the patient themselves or those nearby to assist (somebody would have had to be in a position to call for assistance to begin with so there is most likely a conscious person around). Obviously not ideal, but in conjuction with standard on the ground responders I would imagine this would be a much better way to address the time urgency requirement.
Also, why is the BBC feeling a need to put quotes around "fly" in the article? If a person is, like, lifting off from the ground, and moving through the air in a controlled fashion driven by jet engines, isn't that pretty exactly flying, without quotes?