The Great American Jet Pack by Steve Lehto

Hydrogen-peroxide—expensive to produce, unstable in transport and fundamental to personal flight—pours from tanks through a tube, over a custom-made catalyst. Ignition! A pilot soars into solo flight. Dreams of many generations take flight too. The Great American Jet Pack follows the contrails of visionaries who dare to dream of leaving the ground under their own control.

These dreams likely began as soon as humans could walk upright. Prehistoric images in caves and in petroglyphs represented humans in solo flight, like birds. The Icarus myth and other stories showed the grip that flight held on the human imagination even millennia ago.

The dream may be taking flight, thanks to the imaginations of inventors—Wendell Moore, Bob Courter, Bill Suitor and others—who challenge gravity along with society’s skepticism. Such characters fill this book and point the way toward a jet pack in every closet.

Widely published author Steve Lehto has written several works that chronicle man’s dream to push the boundaries of the modern engine, including Chrysler’s Turbine Car: The Rise and Fall of Detroit’s Coolest Creation. In Jet Pack, the author pulls from nearly 150 sources.

It’s a wild ride.

Technology follows imagination. That commodity was in no short supply at West Point in 1940, at a time when Colonel Charles Parkin trained cadets to use flamethrowers that propelled flammable liquid with the use of nitrogen. The Colonel wondered about the nitrogen tanks—he strapped one on, opened the valve and felt the thrust of the tank aid a leap.

It meant a leap forward for the idea of solo flight.

Flash forward 21 years, to February 1961. Wendell Moore at Bell Aerosystems designed and patented a rocket belt that held enough fuel to lift a pilot for 21 seconds of flight. During testing, the pilot harnessed himself, but one of the safety tethers scraped a piece of metal near the facility’s ceiling. Compromised, the tether could not support Moore’s weight when his engines stopped. The fall not only shattered Moore’s knee cap but his dream as well. He would not fly his invention again.

Another pioneer, Bob Courter tested a flying platform called the WASP II in the early 1980s. Courter published a book explaining how a rocket belt works, and he appeared at the Rocket Belt Convention in Niagara in 2006, still an enthusiast for solo flight. Still a dreamer.

One man made the dream as close to reality as we’ve gotten so far. From Lehto’s book:

In September, 2008, (Yves) Rossy flew across the English Channel. With National Geographic filming, Rossy stepped out of an airplane at eighty-two hundred feet and fired his turbines. His twenty-two mile trip began above Calais and took him just thirteen minutes as he reached speeds of 125 miles an hour. When he got over the Dover cliffs, he did a couple of loops and deployed his parachute. When he landed, he spoke to reporters. “With that crossing I showed it is possible to fly a little bit like a bird.”