The Great American Jet Pack

April 1, 2013
A sapid look into the historically futile attempts to develop a gravity-defying, single-person flying machine. Personal air flight, independent from conventional planes and unwieldy hot air balloons, has been pondered by hopeful inventors for centuries, writes Lehto (Chrysler's Turbine Car: The Rise and Fall of Detroit's Coolest Creation, 2010, etc.). Challenged by the heretofore impossibility of achieving lasting stability while airborne, a great many scientists, inventors and hopeful aeronautical specialists have tried and been mostly unsuccessful. The author applauds many of these creative efforts while charting the jet pack's fascinating evolution. The experimental designs and concepts are legion and include 1940s military engineer Charles Zimmerman's propellered "flying shoes," a device that opened the floodgates for more progressive ideas like Stanley Hiller Jr.'s kinesthetic twin-engine-powered platform and aircraft engineer Wendell Moore's innovative, hydrogen peroxide-fueled rocket belt backpack. All saw their dreams rise and eventually plummet, some with tragic outcomes. Tweaked innovations on Moore's concept continued for decades, with each milestone, from pump hoses to overhead airscrews, improving on the prototype before it, yet issues with safety and flight duration stifled progress. Grounded with an academic tone, Lehto's chapters are rife with technical processes and jargoned commentary wisely tempered with graphic illustrations and photographs, which comprehensively chronicle the unique and choppy legacy of jet-propulsion devices. Though drier than Mac Montandon's Jetpack Dreams (2008), Lehto's approach should appeal to armchair inventors and basement tinkerers. While personal-flight prototypes edge from pipe dream to purchase order, this well-documented history provides a satisfying substitution.

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April 15, 2013
Gilligan flew one on the island. So did James Bond, fleeing from some baddies. So did Professor John Robinson, while he was lost in space. First thought up by sf writers back in the 1920s and turned into reality in the mid1960s, the jet pack was the latest in a long line of personal flying devices that included flying shoes, wearable rockets, and a flying platform. It almost immediately entered the public consciousness, becoming a sort of pop-culture icon, the device that was going to completely change the way people got from place to place. It hasn't yet, but as Lehto says, the story of the jet packof, indeed, the quest for the perfect personal lift deviceis really part of the larger story of man's dream of flying. It's a fascinating tale, full of wild ideas and serious science (with, yes, a little kidnapping, torture, and murder), and Lehto tells it very well, focusing on the people for whom creating a functional small-scale flying machine was not just a puzzle to be solved but a calling.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)