When you are in an airplane and looking out into the beautiful sky, what do you think? Well, I always thought about how amazing it would be to soar through the sky like Iron Man or Superman. Apparently, Yves Rossy also had the same idea. He became the first and only man in history to fly with a jet-propelled wing. After being a military pilot, Rossy worked for Swiss International Airlines flying commercial flights.
All wings work on the principal of lift created by the shape of the wing in the opposite direction of gravity. In simple terms the top surface of a wing is convex whilst the bottom or under side of the wing is flat. As air flows over the wing shape the pressure decreases on the top surface and the pressure increases on the under surface. The result is lift.
Jetman originally developed and built a system comprising a backpack with semi-rigid airplane-type carbon-fiber wings with a span of about 7.9 ft and powered by four attached Jet-Cat P200 jet engines. After he has jumped out of the airplane, the engines are ignited giving him the forward speed required to fly. The first flight lasted for a little over six minutes and reached a top speed of 186 mph. After about fifteen models, Yves Rossy reached a maximum velocity of 300 mph that lasted about ten minutes. One day, you will look up at the sky and I WILL BE JETMAN!
4 Comments
Lorena Barba posted on October 6, 2011 at 2:03 pm
Hi Shahil — maybe you should enlighten us as to why you think Jetman is related to our class discussion!
Ryan Erf posted on October 7, 2011 at 4:51 pm
If I may defend Shahil, I think its related because of our discussion of biomimetics. This is the closest a human has gotten to mimicking the way birds fly. Sure it doesn’t have flapping wings but it also doesn’t have the ridged body of an airplane and the way the “jetman” moves his body effects the flight path. This guy is more in tune if you will with the flight than any human has ever been. I am excluding the wingsuits we looked at earlier because this is powered flight.
Shahil Patel posted on October 7, 2011 at 6:16 pm
While I do agree with Ryan, when I wrote this post I was thinking more about how Jetman had to glide out of an airplane to gain the initial velocity needed to fly.
A&M Bellevue Auto Service posted on November 20, 2011 at 12:50 pm
Awesome video. Thank you for sharing.