Jetman and The Grand Canyon

Swiss pilot, Yves Rossy, has been making a name for himself as the Jetman. As you'll see in the video below, the name is well-deserved, given the jet-powered backpack that Rossy straps on to defy gravity and possibly sanity.

According to the press release for the flight, Rossy was airborne for approximately eight minutes, soaring hundreds of feet above the canyon after launching from a helicopter. Rossy's team reported that the Jetman flew at speeds of nearly 200 mph before deploying a parachute and landing safely on the canyon floor beside the Colorado River.

The official Jetman website has extensive information about Yves Rossy and his adrenaline-powered jetpack:

In 2006, the Swiss pilot Yves Rossy became the first and only man in the history of aviation to fly with a jet-propelled wing, and still is to this day.

Yves has always dedicated all his free time to flight and experimented all its forms. His dream was however to try to fly in the most natural way possible, by removing the need for the complicated enclosure an aircraft is. He was therefore drawn to the world of free fall, and experimented by trial and error all ways that could allow him to stay longer in the air and control his trajectory, to turn a fall into a flight: sky surf, wingsuit. Still not satisfied, he developed his first real wing, made of a rigid harness and inflatable wing panels, that he was to strap to his back to exceed the performance of all other attempts at “falling forward” that existed at the time.

The next step was naturally to gain total freedom by making the whole wing rigid and adding engines. Yves chose to go with model jet turbines, at first 2 of them, which allowed him to just hold level flight in 2005, and then 4 to finally conquer the 3rd dimension in 2006 – not within an enclosed space with mechanical controls and instruments, but by truly flying like a bird for 10 minutes at a time, with nothing but his body and feelings, floating like if the wing was a natural part of his body, so much that he doesn’t even feel it in flight. This was finally the reward of 10 years of development and more than 15 prototypes. All he has is an altimeter for safety, and a tiny throttle control in his hand.

Check out the Jetman website for more info about Yves and the flights he has made as the Jetman...