By Anthony Patrickson
The idea of becoming airborne using a jetpack has captured people’s imaginations ever since the jet engine first appeared. Unfortunately, unless you’re James Bond or Buck Rogers, the realm of the imagination is where the idea’s firmly remained… until now.
Glenn Martin and his team at the Martin Aircraft Company have brought the jetpack dream alive with the Martin Jetpack.
Bringing the jetpack to reality was the vision of a five year old Glenn Martin, but unlike most of us, he listened to listen to his inner child and has pursued his dream of one day flying one.
Glenn’s quest finally materialised in 2004 with the creation of the Martin Aircraft Company in Christchurch and the mission began to turn his childhood vision into a viable commercial entity.
The man behind the machine
The man behind the machineGlenn is a visionary and self confessed mad scientist, yet there is something
different about this inventor, his self awareness is immediately apparent as he recalls the steps that led to Martin Jetpacks becoming a viable venture.
“We’re all taught that we have to grow up to not pursue such fantasies, but at the age of 21 I was drinking at a pub in Dunedin while at Otago University and a conversation popped up about jetpacks. As you could imagine, it was very cold in a student house in Dunedin during the winter months, so I spent a large amount of time in the library and in between studying biochemistry and physiology, I used to research about jetpacks.”
The more he learned, the more he realised the design flaws of other jetpack ideas. “I spent about three and a half years doing the mathematics and discovered the only jetpacks out there were not in fact jetpacks per se, they were actually rocket-packs made by Bell Aerospace and they could only fly for around 26 seconds and you had to weigh less than around 60kg to be able to get off the ground. I weigh about 100kg so that just wasn’t going to work for me.”
As you’d expect with a jetpack, the barriers between the inventor and the market place were plentiful and had restricted many great ideas in the past, but he wasn’t about for fall victim to the inability to market a product.
“I did a lot of reading on inventions and in particular, inventors and discovered that many of them fell over when it came to the marketing and business side of their work. I then thought what do I do with a biochemistry degree to help get over this?
“I came to Christchurch deliberately as the mechanical engineering department is located in the University of Canterbury and I took a job in the pharmaceutical industry working in sales and marketing to learn a bit about the real world”
Working with the University of Canterbury during the early phase of research and development linked Glenn with like minded engineers who verified his calculations and saw the potential in what he described
as “something you strap to your back and take flight”.
What started out as a hobby quickly morphed into something more serious; prototypes were built, intensive testing carried out and what seemed like a pipe dream was, literally, beginning to take off. The excitement attracted other scientists and by 2008 Martin had more than 200 people from all around the world who’d signed non-disclosure agreements working on his project.
“We eventually got it off the ground with my wife, Vanessa strapped in six weeks after the birth of our second child. I needed someone who was light enough, who would keep their mouth shut and was as mad as me, to be the pioneering pilot – that was Vanessa!”
That initial video of the jetpack leaving the ground and with that, delivering on promises, enabled more funding to be sourced and further steps were taken improve the already significant engineering feats that had been invested into the jetpack.
No8 Ventures Management, a venture capitalist specialising in taking Kiwi companies to the world, recognised the potential and invested a significant amount of cash to “take it from the garage”. With a workshop and more engineers onboard, Martin Jetpacks began shaping into a business rather than Glenn’s private crusade.
In 2008 Glenn and the team took their invention to the Mecca of aviation – Oshkosh, USA. The annual celebration of aviation attracts enthusiasts from all four corners of the globe to gaze upon feats of flight in all shapes and forms.
“We took our development to Oshkosh for two reasons; firstly, to show the aviation world our invention and secondly to decipher whether there was actually a market for jetpacks. Initially we expected to take orders for three to four jetpacks, leave the show and deliver them the next year and so on. But apparently there is a sizeable market for jetpacks and the numbers were in the thousands.”
As so happens when dreams and dedication collide, amazing feats of ingenuity take place. Martin Jetpacks had now brought the fabled idea into the realm of the real, unearthing high demand in previously unforeseen markets. The search and rescue market was understandably interested and saw the possibilities to strap a paramedic to a jetpack to access locations unreachable by ambulance, quicker. The Martin Jetpack is now scoped as a potential life saver, a vital tool for the emergency services to deploy when necessary.
The new P12
Officially released this August, the new P12 prototype is being hailed as a significant step forward for a company you hardly accuse of not being forward thinking.
Martin Aircraft CEO Peter Coker says the P12 prototype is a “huge step up” from the previous prototype. “Changing the position of the jetpack’s ducts has resulted in a quantum leap in performance over the previous prototype, especially in terms of the aircraft’s manoeuvrability.
“We have full certification from the New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority for manned flight and have made great progress in recent months in increasing the flight time of the aircraft,” he said.
The company’s current focus is on improving its jetpack’s performance through some engine refinements in order to get it ready for commercial sale.
It is intended that the first product to the market will be a First Responder jetpack for specialist commercial users in defence and civil defence. The goal is to get the flying hours up with users like these while continuing the development work for the lighter recreational Jetpack for personal use.
In the limelight
Publicity snowballs easily when the topic of interest is solo human flight. Martin’s Jetpack has made the front page of The New York Times, Time magazine’s Top 50 Inventions of 2010, plus the team were invited to meet the likes of David Letterman and Jay Leno.
“We were also famously offered the chance to fly the jetpack at the Playboy Mansion. The deal was that the pilot would fly the jetpack for a photo shoot, but the pilot we had was my 16 year old son, unfortunately that call got directed to Mum and the answer was a resounding no!”
The Company website
www.martinjetpack.com was launched in 2008 and has received in excess of 160,000 enquiries.
How does it work?
The Martin Jetpack is not so much a jetpack as a jet-stream-pack – the jets of air from the two ducted fans enables the craft to still be referred to as a ‘jet’ pack.
The advanced composite body uses propulsion methods to power two carbon-Kevlar rotors either side of a harnessed pilot. The engine is a 2.0 litre V4 with 200 horsepower fuelled by premium petrol.
There is no torque, compared to a helicopter, making the flight process smoother which, in turn, is aided by the on-board computer. Two joystick-like controls, one in either hand determine height and direction simultaneously providing a simplistic mode of flight.
The next few years will be extremely exciting for the Martin Aircraft team as the Martin Jetpack begins to hit the market. All eyes will be on the Christchurch based innovators and one thing is for certain, the sky is certainly not the limit, it’s actually the destination for Glenn Martin and the team.
