Swiss adventurer Yves Rossy will risk everything to be the first to fly across the English Channel using a single, jet-propelled wing attached to his back.
Flight of the Jet Man , Flight of the Jet Man , As Yves Rossy's historic flight across the English Channel nears its end, he hopes his precise fuel calculations were accurate.
Flight of the Jet Man , History in the Making , Jet Man Yves Rossy makes a successful flight across the English Channel, with wings of his own design.
Flight of the Jet Man , The Human Fuselage , Just one wrong turn of the head could send Jet Man spinning out of control.
Flight of the Jet Man , Flying into Another Dimension , Ex-fighter-pilot Yves "Jet Man" Rossy reveal the wonders of the strap-on wing that's making aviation history.
Flight of the Jet Man , Engine , Here's the full-throttle bottle on the amazing engines set to launch Jet Man into aviation history.
Flight of the Jet Man , The Emergency Parachute , Jet Man and ex-fighter-pilot Yves Rossy explains how he'll avoid an accident over the English Channel.
Flight of the Jet Man , The Foldable Wing , See the drama literally unfold as our irrepressible Jet Man Yves Rossy reveals the innovations and inventions contained in the wing that sends him sky-rocketing!
Flight of the Jet Man,Yves Rossy in wind tunnel.
Flight of the Jet Man,Swiss adventurer Yves Rossy before a test flight.
Flight of the Jet Man,Yves before take off from jump plane during a test flight.
Flight of the Jet Man,Yves Rossy practices with his single jet propelled plane.
Flight of the Jet Man,Ultraviolet light testing of wind flow indicators.
Flight of the Jet Man,Wind tunnel engineer makes final calibration before test begins.
Flight of the Jet Man,Yves getting into jump plane before his test flight over the French Alps.
Flight of the Jet Man,Yves and the AMP team preparing the wing with a RF transmitter.
Flight of the Jet Man,Yves just after a test flight.
Flight of the Jet Man,Yves parachute deployed during test flight and landing safely.
A former Air Force pilot, Yves Rossy has spent much of his career flying thousands of people around the planet as a captain for SWISS. But when Rossy is not flying planes, he is jumping out of them. Freestyle, skysurf, freely ? you name it, he has done it. But no matter how daring, these adventure sports never fulfilled his childhood dream: to soar like a bird. Not with a glider, but with a propelled fixed wing. Appearing live on National Geographic Channel in Jet Man Live, Rossy will attempt to become the first person to cross the English Channel using a single, jet-propelled wing.
Rossy devotes all of his spare time to flying in the purest sense, carrying out more and more tests using equipment developed on a trial and error basis: an inflatable wing, which carried him over the 12 kilometres separating the Swiss and French banks of Lake Geneva, a paraglider and a surf board that sent him skimming through Geneva?s water fountain before spectacularly grabbing the handle of a water skier, and a skydiving adventure on a disc ?above? the Matterhorn. Today, Rossy has become FusionMan, the first man in the world to attach jet engines to a single wing and fly.
Growing up with his head in the clouds and his feet on the ground, Rossy pursued a technical apprenticeship and then graduated in engineering. As a fighter pilot, discovering the Mirage III supersonic fighter plane was certainly one of the high points of Rossy?s career. He flew the aircraft for 15 years, and also piloted historic aircraft such as the Hunter and the Venom.
An accomplished sportsman, his past and present hobbies include surfing, water-skiing, wakeboarding, skysurfing, parachuting, aerobatics, motorbike riding, rafting and hang-gliding, to name but a few. Flying under a jet wing is the culmination of a 30-year career interspersed with exploits and firsts.
Yves Rossy was born on 27, August 1959, in Neuchatel, Switzerland. He speaks English, French and German fluently.
By William Lee
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Humans’ dreams of flight go back at least as far as the ancient Greeks, whose mythology tells of the inventor Daedalus escaping a wrathful monarch by fashioning wings from wax and feathers and flying away. (His better-known son Icarus was not so fortunate; he strayed too close to the sun, so that his wings melted, causing him to fall into the sea and drown.) It was the Wright brothers in 1903 who came up with the first powered, heavier-than-air machine that could fulfill that yearning, but even the ubiquitous modern success of the airplane hasn’t stopped other dreamers from experimenting with alternative methods of emulating the birds. Some of their inspirations have been ingenious, while others tend more toward the outlandish. Here is an assortment of personal flight technologies and the stories behind them.
The idea of creating a machine that would imitate avian flight by flapping its wings may date back to the fourth-century B.C. Greek mathematician and politician Archytas of Tarentum, who by some accounts created a wooden bird connected to a pulley and counterweight that flew from a lower perch to a higher one when activated by a puff of air. But Leonardo da Vinci, the 15th- and early 16th-century artist and inventor, took the concept further, making scores of sketches of human-powered ornithopters. Leonardo’s designs put pilots in both prone and upright positions and called for them to flap their wings via pulleys employing both hands and feet. Though Leonardo believed that birds’ muscles were “incomparably more powerful” than those of humans relative to their size, he hoped that the idea of flying would inspire humans to somehow find the additional strength needed to get off the ground in an ornithopter. In that spirit, Leonardo wrote that “the great bird will make its first flight upon the great swan [Mount Ceceri, near Florence], filling the whole world with amazement, and all records with its fame, and it will bring eternal glory to the nest in which it was born.” It is not known whether Leonardo ever actually tried to build a working model. In recent years, inventors have returned to the concept. In 2006, retired University of Toronto aerospace professor James DeLaurier managed to get a manned jet engine-powered ornithopter to stay aloft for 14 seconds, before it was hit by a crosswind and nearly flipped over.
In the 1930s, professional air-circus parachutist Clem Sohn became fascinated with the idea of flying through the air horizontally rather than just vertically. During his jumps, he practiced “swimming” in the air before jerking his ripcord, and found that he could move as many as 300 feet in any direction. When a friend told him that “you ought to sprout wings,” Sohn decided that he would. After studying the anatomy of flying squirrels and bats, he created a pair of wings from airplane fabric and metal tubing, which he fastened to the arms and sides of his jump suit. Between the legs, he sewed a web-like tail fin. In 1935, he jumped from a plane at an altitude of 12,000 feet and, after a 2,000-foot drop, spread his arms and legs, until the air caught his wings. After performing an inside loop and other aerobatic maneuvers for more than a minute, Sohn pulled his parachute ripcord and landed, about three miles from his starting point. He spent the next two years performing similar stunts at fairs and air meets, until at an exhibition in France in 1937, both his regular and emergency parachutes failed to open, and he fell to his death. Other daredevils who experimented with wingsuits — such as Frenchman Patrick de Gayardon in the 1980s and 1990s — met a similarly grisly fate. In 1999, Croatian base jumper Robert Pecnik and his Finnish compatriot Jari Kuosma developed an improved wingsuit design capable of slowing a flyer to 12-13 meters per second in downward vertical speed, compared to the 50 meters per second that a parachutist will drop.
After World War II, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics engineer Charles H. Zimmerman dreamed up a concept initially known as “Flying Shoes.” Zimmerman saw the rotors on top of a helicopter as inherently unstable. Instead, he wanted to put them beneath a flying craft, which he believed a pilot could control using his natural balancing reflexes, in a fashion similar to riding a bicycle or standing on a surfboard. In 1953, aircraft manufacturer Hiller Helicopters signed a contract with the Office of Naval Research to secretly develop a design that incorporated Zimmerman’s theories. Hiller built a prototype, the twin engine Model 1031 Flying Platform, which in January 1955 became the first ducted-fan vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft ever to fly. The U.S. Army subsequently contracted Hiller to develop a larger version of the flying platform, called the VZ-1 Pawnee, which had a third engine. The Pawnee’s added weight, however, made it more difficult for pilots to use their balance to guide the craft, and it was never put into production.
During World War II, German scientists developed a personal flight device called the Himmelstürmer, consisting of a pair of low-power rockets strapped to the back and chest of a pilot, which supposedly could enable him to fly 180 feet in the air. It was intended to enable engineering units to jump over minefields and waters without bridges. After the war, a U.S. Army radar engineer named Thomas W. Moore got a similar idea, and in 1950 was given a $25,000 grant to design the “jetvest,” intended to help troops jump as far as 20 feet over battlefield obstacles. The Army found the concept sufficiently intriguing that it continued the research. In 1953, a young Bell Aerosystems engineer named Wendell F. Moore (no relation to Thomas) was assigned to the project. Moore and his team spent years developing a prototype that used rockets powered by hydrogen peroxide. In 1961, test pilot Harold Graham took the first rocket belt flight in history, attaining an altitude of just 18 inches but traveling 113 feet in 13 seconds. The following year, Graham demonstrated the rocket belt for President John F. Kennedy at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The rocket belt’s inability to stay in the air for very long, however, kept the military from ever putting it into production. In the late 1960s, Bell developed a larger jet belt device that reportedly could remain aloft for up to 20 minutes, but its loudness made it unsuited for the surveillance missions for which it was intended.
In 1982, a 33-year-old truck driver named Larry Walters proved that you don’t need sophisticated technology to fly. Walters lashed 45 helium weather balloons, weighted with jugs of spring water for ballast, to an aluminum lawn chair and took off from the backyard of his fiancee’s home in San Pedro, California. Why a lawn chair? “I wanted to be comfortable,” he later explained to the Washington Post. Walters wore a parachute and carried two citizens band radios and a BB gun, which he intended to use to shoot out the balloons when he wanted to return to the ground. He rose to about 16,000 feet, but never got anywhere near his intended destination of the Mojave Desert, 300 miles away. Instead, Walters drifted back to Earth in nearby Long Beach, where he became entangled in a power line and briefly caused a blackout in a small section of the city. While Walters’ stunt garnered newspaper headlines across the nation, the Federal Aviation Administration wasn’t amused and cited “the chaise lounge Lindbergh,” as the Christian Science Monitor dubbed him, with multiple violations of federal aircraft regulations. In the summer of 2008, Kent Couch, a 48-year-old gas station owner, improved on Walters, successfully flying 235 miles across the Oregon desert in a lawn chair rigged with helium-filled party balloons.
At the Experimental Aircraft Association’s 2008 AirVenture air show, New Zealand inventor Glenn Martin unveiled his Martin Jetpack, whose name is a bit misleading; the 250-pound device is equipped not with wearable jets, but with a gas-powered V-4 piston engine and two ducted fans mounted on a frame to provide the lift. The Federal Aviation Administration classifies it as an experimental ultralight airplane. The device is designed to fly for up to 30 minutes and attain an altitude of 8,000 feet. Martin sees the Jetpack, which is priced at $100,000, as a recreational sport vehicle — “a Jet Ski for the sky.” While it might also conceivably provide commuters with a convenient way to escape traffic jams, don’t plan on using one to get to work anytime soon; FAA regulations for ultralight aircraft currently prohibit their use for point-to-point travel. Martin is hopeful that restriction eventually will be lifted.
