It cannot be a person, unless there is some incredible breakthrough in energy storage density.
Whatever that object is, it's too small to hold enough batteries to contain the energy needed to lift a human being for any serious length of time. Even using chemical storage like gasoline or kerosine, you'd need to bring a very large tank with you to stay airborne any length of time. There's no lifting body, like wings, to make staying aloft more efficient either, like an airplane uses.
My guess is that it's a prank. A fairly large drone loosely carrying a very light dummy. And as far as pranks go, they have succeeded.
> and I presume it could go longer with an extra gas tank
There are limits to that. If you carry an extra gas tank, then you're lifting even more mass- fuel is heavy! There are significant diminishing returns on carrying more fuel.
That said, you do make some great points- I could well be wrong.
I suspect the FBI are over there asking a lot of questions too, lol.
The object in the video looked pretty high. With only eight minutes of fuel, if it was manned flight, that's got to be a pretty dangerous altitude to hit. The pilot would need a boat very close by.
3000 feet isn't that high, shouldn't take more than a minute to reach. And the info on those packs says their operating ceiling is 15000 feet, so going up to 3000 feet should be no problem.
Which jetpack gets 20min of flight time? Modern jetpacks get 30 seconds of flight time. The 20min flight sequences are actually lots of extremely short flights edited together to look like a single extended flight.
Yeah, and LA is full of people who like making realistic fakes/models and lots of time on their hands (pandemic really slowed model/prop making early on).
It's unlikely to be an electric vehicle if it's carrying a full-sized human. You just need so much weight in batteries & swept area for props for more than a couple minutes of flight that it's difficult to pack it into a form factor anything like the size & shape of a human.
Given the location and the current state of the technology, though, a liquid fueled jetpack is perfectly possible. It doesn't have to be very efficient if the flight is only a few minutes long. A typical helicopter may achieve 5 hours in the air without any lift to glide ratio. Jets are less efficient, but still efficient enough for short flights.
You may infer a TWR limitation of jet aircraft. It's real, but it's not driven by technical limitations of the jet propulsion technology, but rather by maximizing the range using optimal amounts of lift & fuel for a fixed mass of engine. It doesn't make much sense to use engines so powerful & heavy as a fraction of aircraft mass that they can hover straight up to cruising altitude; If you had engines that powerful, you would be hanging a bigger fuel tank on the vehicle and launch it conventionally. VTOL at high subsonic or faster is an exceedingly range-limited means of flight.
If one were doing this as a prank, why would they be flying it over the ocean and near the airport rather than in areas with lots of people who might see and record it? Both locations this was spotted in reduce the effectiveness of the prank and increase the potential penalties for executing the prank.
For anyone with access to YouTube and not Instagram, or not willing to accept their cookie+tracking stuff, this might be an alternative: https://youtu.be/jKOFriZfJgw
Does Zapata's turbine flyboard use a line to the surface? I haven't seen one in videos. The more common flyboards that pump water from the ocean or a lake up into the jets and then back down obviously do.
No idea as this is the first time I even heard of this.
But a gas turbine (a jet engine, basically) is efficient, kerosene is very energetic, and for a hoverboard I imagine the hot & compressed exhaust itself is what’s mechanically useful.
There’s no reason to have a line other than as a tether, though that comes with its own risks.
I noticed something under his feet too. I think you're on to something.
So more "hoverboard" than "jet pack" might be the future headlines. Or at least jet-pack-like hoverboard. The flight time impressive I guess, not sure of the state of these things.
Edit: I'm guessing the jet skis are following him to recover some expensive hardware quickly and the dude himself.
A couple weeks ago there was an ad on the front page of HN for some jet pack company that was hiring. Wonder if they're at all related.
Edit: I also wonder about the legality of this. Ultralights don't need to be registered and this would probably fall under that category. I think they are limited to Class E/G airspace.
Because they’re advertising their services? They’re the first people to have gotten a video of this. I doubt a flight school would risk their entire business for a vital marketing ploy.
They aren’t risking anything... I’m not saying they actually flew in a jet pack I’m saying the footage isn’t real.
Seems like a safe way to get a ton of free press then say it was a marketing stunt in a few days. Aviation websites would be covering this a lot more seriously if it had credibility. Not reporting it to the FAA is also a weird move if it is real.
Has anyone tried to stack and super-res the video frames? It is awfully small to see details but it seems like there might be a few clips where a multi-frame-based enhancement could do something.
I get the sentiment but please don't make this a thing. You probably already understand that superresolution can only invent a plausible upscaling, no extra information is gained from the pixels - but the general public don't know this. I really think we should be cautious about normalising the use of such tools for conducting forensics on photos.
It sounds like you're referring to machine learning based superresolution? Superresolution by aligning and combining images involves a lot more pixels in total, and so more information.
Can you elaborate on this? If you have multiple frames where the target has moved around and you line up the images couldn’t we get single image with more information?
At least this one is in airspace reserved for training and aerobatics. Messing around in LAX's approach airspace is much worse. Frankfurt and Gatwick airports have been shut down at least once due to drone activity. Changi is shooting down drones with a microwave weapon.
Drones need a GPS module that also reports prohibited airspace. Drones could use that to shut down if someone tried to fly them into prohibited airspace.
Unfortunately (maybe), drones aren't magical technology that you can only get from the government.
The cat is out of the bag, it's easy to make a drone at home out of generic parts. Anyone who wants to fly a drone into prohibited airspace can do it. And an even remotely-sophisticated attacker could do it with almost no chance of getting caught. That's just the world we live in now.
And an even remotely-sophisticated attacker could do it with almost no chance of getting caught.
Anti-drone technology is advancing. Chengdu airport installed what looks like a fire-finder radar, usually used to track artillery shells. Avaelliant has a drone detection system for sale, and it's in use at a few airports. Both are phased array radars, with no moving parts and flat antenna panels. Avaelliant's unit looks like a big cell phone tower antenna.
Definitively something similar to what Franky Zapata [1] do with his invention. He crossed the Chanel [2] with a step in the middle (on a boat) to refill.
There's at least two or three Air Force bases in the area around Palo Verdes. I don't think they'd be flying some secret prototype in that area and in broad daylight like this, but its always hard to figure out what and why the military does sometimes.
I think you're probably right in this case. However The Quiet One, a stealth helicopter based on the Hughes OH-6, was reputedly tested over Los Angeles in the 70s. An unusually quiet helicopter doubtlessly attracts less attention than a jetpack though.
I have no idea what this is, but no doubt that it exists. I'm guessing it's a drone, but have no idea really. I really can't wait for this mystery to be solved though. It's really captured my imagination.
It is difficult to judge the airspeed of another flying object from an airplane unless you are going at approximately the same speed and direction. Is there any evidence in any sighting that these are not balloons?
That is the very logical thing to think to me on first viewing.
It's looks like a pile of balloons released from some party.
That also fits technically outside of UFO tech.
But this is a CIA/UFO tech forum. No point trying to explain it's not a drone, or a balloon made to look like a jet pack or a weather balloon. The normal X-files Scully stuff is fun. Boring things like party balloons are boring.
I can’t believe this flight school does training out over open water like that. As a pilot from the Midwest I actively fly around the Great Lakes in light piston engine aircraft, even in the summer.
You can't really compare Midwest and LA. Despite lack of good engine out options over the ground, LA Basin has several very busy airports, complex airspace and crazy traffic.
Crashing in the water, particularly the water temperature of the Great Lakes, is nearly a death sentence. You can definitely survive impact and get out but you’re not likely to survive the water unless rescue is minutes away. The exception is the end of a particularly warm summer in maybe Lake Erie or southern Lake Michigan.
Now compared to over land, you can easily land a small piston engine plane just about anywhere. Highways, large parking lots, open fields, all become acceptable landing spots. In a Cessna 172 which is commonly used for flight training, impact speed can be as slow as 45 knots. Even a crash into a dense forest is survivable with some luck.
I guess I’m just not familiar enough with LA airspace to fully appreciate the lack of space for training flights. I’ve been in and out of LAX and it is busy no doubt. I just haven’t done GA operations in that area so I wasn’t all that familiar with all of the additional airports and traffic.
Personally, my pucker factor would be exceptionally high practicing stalls, or multi-engine training with engine shutdowns and Vmc demos over open water. Regardless of the temperature.
Planes are really easy to land in an open field in the event of emergency - simulated forced landings are required training for pilots. Landing on water without a sea plane is much harder.
There are very few "open fields" near LAX. Feel free to look at a satellite view on google maps, and compare to Great Lakes area. One of the denser urban areas vs a lot of agricultural use.
They have (assuming its been the same person) been sighted 2 times previously by airline pilots.
No one knows who they are, so they're obviously unregistered. But they're flying into the arrival and departure paths of LAX. So they will be in a heap of trouble once they're identified. That makes this latest sighting all the more brazen.
This sighting at least isn’t in the bravo. The person is under the shelf in class E and therefore isn’t violating any airspace. They wouldn’t be subject to transponder or ADS-B requirements either because they (probably) don’t have an engine-driven electrical system.
The previous sightings do sound like this person busted the bravo but I’d have to do more research to be sure.
He would probably be too small to show up on the type of radar you are probably thinking about, known as "primary radar." Most airspace isn't covered by primary radar though and instead relies on transponders to track planes.
Big military radars can track a cricket ball miles and miles away, so I assume yes, but they probably wouldn't say because it gives away their capabilities
"A guy flying out over the ocean in a jet pack at around 3,000 feet, especially one without any lifting surfaces, is a puzzling proposition, to say the least. Jet packs that do exist have very short ranges and are not equipped to be flying in dense airspace, especially thousands of feet in the air. "
> ... and are not equipped to be flying in dense airspace, especially thousands of feet in the air.
Isn't this just saying that you have no way to avoid being hit by an airplane, no transponder, maybe no radio, no flightpath, and are breaking about a million laws by doing so?
(I mean, doesn't address the "short range" problem, but "idiocy" seems sufficient to overcome all the rest.)
very napkin as we don't know how good their engines are. For small and thus low efficient jet engines - with exhaust velocity of anywhere between 500-1000m/s and with the 1:50 fuel/air ratio one has to burn 40-80g/s to get 200kg thrust. Thus a 1000s of flight takes 40-80kg of fuel.
There was a science fiction short story where a group of scientists was invited by military personnel to watch a short secret footage of someone flying a jetpack. The scientists were told that the inventor only had one prototype and he crashed it killing himself and destroying the unique device. Next several months the scientists spent brainstorming and trying to figure out how he did it.
Spoiler!
The footage turned out to be fabricated by military. The scientists still built a prototype of the jetpack. Not so fast, light and agile but they made something that was previously considered impossible.
I have an anecdote from a mobile device manufacturer: a new sensor module was able to provide all sorts of biometric data to a smartphone and just snapped onto the phone, no other configuration. The device was shown to a team of top engineers and they were given a couple weeks to develop an equivalent system.
The sensing was easy and worked fine, but at the end of the project they could never replicate the seamless pairing of the device to the phone. Left with all sorts of theories about hacked network stacks...they admitted defeat. Only to then learn: the device was transmitting data with inaudible soundwaves picked up by the phone's microphone.
What you're hinting at can cut both ways: you can fake the magical, while often the magical is far simpler than you thought.
Source? Sounds like bullshit or terrible engineering. Transmitting data via audio would come up in a 10m brainstorm about possible communication channels.
"I just got back from a super-secret conference where someone you don't know--and can't ask questions of--gave me a private demonstration of how they're doing ___ using nothing but Coca-Cola and Mentos.
Your request for funding for ___ is denied, but I'll meet you halfway-- here's a pack of Mentos."
Whatever that object is, it's too small to hold enough batteries to contain the energy needed to lift a human being for any serious length of time. Even using chemical storage like gasoline or kerosine, you'd need to bring a very large tank with you to stay airborne any length of time. There's no lifting body, like wings, to make staying aloft more efficient either, like an airplane uses.
My guess is that it's a prank. A fairly large drone loosely carrying a very light dummy. And as far as pranks go, they have succeeded.