About three weeks ago I posted video of a device called the “Flyboard Air” which purported to be a VTOL turbojet platform a single pilot stands on. At the time, numerous aspects of the video made it seem kinda fishy, like perhaps it was a hoax, or in some other way not quite what it was claimed. Well, it seems it *is* what it claims. It recently got a Guiness World Record for flying around a harbor in France.
The “Flyboard Air” has four turbojets (eventually the control system will allow the craft to safely fly on three if one of the four conks out, but right the prototype isn’t up to it) with a total power of about 1,000 horsepower. The inventor wants to incorporate a wingsuit; this would allow the pilot to lean far forward, tilting the thrust from vertical to horizontal and moving the pilot at 180 km/hr. In this record-winning flight, the pilot flew for nearly four minutes, landed… then took off again and did a “victory lap. Total flight time was probably something like 5 minutes, an order of magnitude improvement over the thirty seconds you’d get out of a rocket belt. Potential flight time is given as 10 minutes. You’d think 1,000 horses would guzzle the jet fuel, so I’m a little surprised it even gets that much.