A Startup for Flying Motorcycles and Jetpacks
From Nanalyze:
It’s been nearly a decade since venture capital firm Founders Fund published its manifesto
complaining about the slowing rate of innovation, encapsulated by the
tagline: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” (The line has been attributed to the firm’s founder and co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, though the essay itself was penned by former Founders Fund-er and writer Bruce Gibney.) Since then, Twitter has doubled the number of characters in a tweet and we’re still waiting on a commercially available flying car. We may have to settle for flying motorcycles and jetpacks instead – if one Los Angeles startup can succeed.
A Startup for Flying Motorcycles and Jetpacks
Officially founded in 2016, JetPack Aviation has raised an estimated $2.75 million
in funding. Most of the money came from a $2 million Seed round last
year led by Draper Associates, a VC fund under the thumb of Tim Draper.
Draper is a venture capitalist with a pretty good track record, with
investments including Chinese tech giant Baidu, Elon Musk companies
Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX, millennial-focused success stories like Twitch and Robinhood, and even Twitter. His son, Adam Draper,
is a fourth-generation venture capitalist whose Boost VC put down
$350,000 on JetPack Aviation more than a year ago. The firm likes to bet
on what it calls sci-fi startups, with a portfolio that includes solar-powered airships, animal-free dairy cheese, and engineered viruses. The world’s most famous startup accelerator, Y Combinator, is also an investor.
David Mayman and Nelson Tyler are the brains behind JetPack Aviation.
Mayman is the CEO and founder, as well as a test pilot who has flown
the company’s jetpack around landmarks like the Statue of Liberty. Tyler
is JetPack Aviation’s chief designer whose own company – Tyler Camera
Systems, founded back in 1964 – develops stabilized camera systems for
helicopters and other bumpy rides. That innovation actually won him an Academy Award in technical achievement for adapting the technology for shots taken from a boat.
A Real-Life Jetpack
Before we dive into the company’s latest project to develop a flying
motorcycle, let’s first geek out on its real-life jetpack. Mayman and
Tyler started collaborating on such a machine way back in 2006-07 –
about 45 years after Bell Aerosystems demonstrated the first working
jetpack for the military. That contraption, however, could only stay
aloft for about 21 seconds on five gallons of hydrogen peroxide. The
Army brass figured the so-called Bell Rocket Belt was more of a toy than
a true military asset. But the idea of a personal flying machine fired
the imagination of more than one tinkerer, including Tyler, who had
worked on various propulsion systems in the 1970s and 1980s including
pulse jets, pressure jets, and gasoline engine-powered ducted fans.
A schematic of the Bell Rocket Belt designed by Nelson Tyler. Credit: JetPack Aviation
In 1984, test pilot Bill Suitor (who had been Sean Connery’s stunt double when James Bond flew a Bell Rocket Belt in the movie Thunderball)
made a spectacular entrance during the opening ceremony of the Olympic
Games in Los Angeles. He was wearing a rocket belt built by – you
guessed it – Nelson Tyler. Tyler had built a copy of the Bell Rocket
Belt in 1969 that he called the NT-1, according to a brief history on Suitor’s personal webpage.
Thirty years later, in 2015, JetPack Aviation unveiled the first workable iteration of its personal vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) machine, the JB9 JetPack. The company went on to develop two more jetpack models, JB10 and JB11:...
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