With four jetpacks slapped on a wing, Jetman takes on Breitling Fighter Jets

Yves Rossy is a 52-year old Swiss pilot, inventor and aviation enthusiast who looks like any other guy on the street should you bump into him at a Starbucks. But there is one crucial difference between him and basically everyone else on the planet- this guy can fly! OK granted he doesn’t fly in the same sense as birds do since he uses four jetpacks and a rather large wing to, er, fly, but what the “Jetman” does is pretty much the closest thing we have to human flight at the moment.

Jetman Flies Alongside Fighter Jets

The not satisfied with feats like having flown over the Grand Canyon at 190 mph, the Jetman has returned to dazzle the world with his own brand of thrills, and this time he is taking on fighter jets! The stunt was created by Rossy with a little help from is friends over at the world’s largest civilian professional aerial stunt ensemble, the Breitling Jet Team, and the stunt was performed and filed at the Breitling Flying days in Buochs, Switzerland.

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Jetman Flies Alongside Fighter Jets

Yves "Jetman" Rossy took his awesome jetpack apparatus to a new level by jumping out of a helicopter and flying alongside the planes.

By just moving his body alone Rossy was able to perform amazing acrobatic stunts in the air with his rigid wing strapped with 4 jet engines providing him the propulsion to keep up with the jets. However, unlike the jets that sped along a runway to take off, the Jetman jumped off a Pilatus PC-6 chopper at an altitude of 11,483-feet (3,500 meters) and glided his way down to an altitude of 3,280-feet (1,000 meters) to meet the two waiting Boeing Stearman wingwalker biplanes.

The first human to fly in formation with two aircrafts, the stunt showed off Rossy’s formation and precision flight abilities, as well as the performance of his jetpack that allowed him to keep with the jet which is quite a feat even though they were flying at the minimum speed. With a distance of only a few meters between them, Rossy flew along the jets for more than six minutes before deploying his parachute and landing.

Though dissidents dismiss Rossy’s achievements as being an example of human flight because he uses jetpacks to propel the wing, the fact that he steers the gear using nothing but his body with a throttle control in his hand to vary his speed, and an altimeter for safety, makes his creation and the execution of his flights truly fantastical. The Jetman is already hard at work trying to prefect a new “delta wing: that would allow him to take off from the ground, stay in the air for more than 10 minutes, and even allow a few friends to join him and realize aerobatic maneuvers and formations.

Via: Business Insider