29 July 2008
World First From New Zealand
For a small country, New Zealand has built an international reputation for delivering the innovative, the record-breaking and the breathtaking. The Martin Jetpack, the world’s first practical jetpack, is all of these.
Today Glenn Martin and his company, Martin Aircraft, joined this growing list of innovative New Zealanders when the Martin Jetpack launched at Oshkosh.
The idea of a personal jetpack has been almost everyone’s dream, especially in the aviation world. Over the past 80 years many have tried, and failed, to realise this dream. Even the most successful, the Bell Rocket Belt, could only fly for a few seconds.
So when Glenn Martin got together with an impressive group of avionic, technical, design and production experts to invent a jetpack that people could just strap on and fly, the rest of the world said it wouldn’t hold it’s breath on that one.
The first serious attempts to build a Jetpack were instigated by the US military in the 1950s. The idea was to build an ultimate “all terrain vehicle” to move military commanders around a battlefield. Several models were built, the most successful of which, the Bell Rocket Belt, first flew in 1961.
Unfortunately it only flew for 26 seconds, leading Mark Jannot of Popular Science Magazine to say in March 2006… “ I myself was most disappointed to discover that a Jetpack that will burn for longer than 30 seconds is out of reach.”
The Martin Aircraft Company was founded in 1998 specifically to research and develop a jetpack that could fly 100 times longer than the 26 seconds of the Bell Rocket Belt. The project was based on a concept developed by Glenn Martin in 1981 and verified by the University of Canterbury, Mechanical Engineering Department, in New Zealand.
In 2005, the 9th prototype achieved sustained flight times, laying the foundation for a viable and successful pre-production prototype to be developed. In 2008 the world’s first practical jetpack was launched at Oshkosh.
The dream is no longer out of reach.