Burn Your Turns: Jet-Pack Skiing Is Here
By Chris Weiss
How do you make skiing more extreme than straightlining 60-degree, three-foot-wide chutes atop serrated ridgelines? You add a jet pack, of course!
At least that’s what you do if you’re a stunt man and extreme sports junkie. Troy Hartman recently designed his own pack built with two Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) jet engines. The engines kick out a 12:1 thrust-weight ratio and provide land speeds of around 47 mph at 50 percent throttle, as tested by Hartman.
Hartman’s first phase of testing included tearing across snow-covered flats and up hills with the jet pack. According to his account, the pack is enough to power a skier up black-diamond-graded hills. And, as you’ll see in the video below, it just shreds on flat terrain.
While his initial testing was based on the ground, Hartman envisions using the pack with a wing for airborne stunts. He’s also gotten several requests to build packs for sale and is mulling the prospect over, though he’s not too sure that it’s a viable business plan (imagine the types of lawsuits one of these things could inspire). [via Troy Hartman]
Wednesday, March 2, 2011 7:58PM
[...] Burn Your Turns: Jet-Pack Skiing Is Here How do you create skiing more extreme than straightlining 60-degree, three-foot-wide chutes atop serrated ridgelines? You add a jet pack, of course! At in the least that’s what you do whenever you’re a stunt man as well as extreme sports junkie. Troy Hartman nowly designed his own pack built goes along with 2 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) jet engines. The engines kick [...] Read more over GadgetCrave [...]
Friday, March 11, 2011 3:19PM
Hopefully in the not too distant future the technology will come way down in cost and be readily available to all who are interested. I am certainly going to do my part in trying to make that a reality.