[treetoppin]

Pretty cool usage scenario, since everyone can imagine a flying hero coming in to save the day. That being said, this feels like a solution looking for a problem. I am sure there are specific areas of responsibility that would benefit from a rapidly deployable single medic carrying a small triage kit with no patient return capability, but they are probably few and far between (especially when you factor in the above need with the capability to purchase, train crew, and maintain such a capability).

As a pilot of a helicopter whose purpose is search and rescue, this system seems a bit cumbersome. Yes, a helicopter can't land in all terrain types, but it is a pretty well established skill set to have medics lowered to survivors, and to have the capability to hoist and then transport survivors to higher level care. Maintaining this capability is expensive, which is why it is usually limited to public safety organizations, though some operators like Air Zermatt are private. While a jetpack medic might be able to compete with a subset up the capabilities of a hoist capable medevac helicopter, it won't have the range, speed, or full spectrum of services. If you end up needing a helicopter to evacuate the person anyways, you probably didn't gain a whole lot by having a jetpack medic fly out there first. Unless the jetpack bases are highly concentrated and very common in an area, they probably won't have a time advantage when it comes to onscene arrival either.

[ChuckMcM]

It sort of depends a bit on cost and a bit on how one operates it doesn't it?

Operations costs on a rescue helicopter can be $1500 - $5000/hr based on publicly available data. What is more, large helicopters can do harm with their down wash. So if you can have a suit, or two, or three sitting in the closet on standby then the cost to respond quickly to one of these events can be much lower than the cost of calling in a helicopter.

Clearly the amount of gear you can carry to the scene is minimal, but you can get an able bodied first aid technician there faster than hiking in and faster than calling in a helicopter, loading up the tech, flying to the location, and lowering them to the ground. Not to mention the challenges of wind effects in wooded terrain where the helicopter pilot and the technician in the rescue basket are essentially in two different wind regimes.

Then there are the TCO costs, what does it cost to own a helicopter versus say 5 flying suits? If the helicopter is down for maintenance you're stuck, but if a suit is down you still have 4 suits ready to go right? That lowers your risk of not having the capability when you need it. How much? Hard to say without knowing the maintenance regimen of the suits but it seems likely the suits would be more resilience against 100% loss of capability.

[treetoppin]

Well I think the question becomes, what sort of situations are actually happening, and then what capability is needed to mitigate those situations? If an area's data says that there are enough people whose position we know, but because they didn't get rapid, low level stabalizing triage care they ended up dying then a system like this might make sense. But if most of the cases involve searching, higher level care, an eventual medevac anyways, or any combination of the above, a SAR organization is probably going to need a helicopter anyways. If you already have a helicopter with hoist capability, then it will probably be hard to make the math justify the additional expense.

While having a smaller fleet of helicopters induces a smaller number of critical failures, if the advantage is the amount of time it takes to get to a location, you'd need a lot of jetpacks to be spread out enough to beat a helicopter. With an advertised endurance of 5-10 minutes, this won't do more than get you a small hop to a remote location. The searching and most of the traversing is going to have to be done by some other vehicle. If every 4x4,truck or ground search party needs to have one of these (and be trained to operate it proficiently), I have a hard time believing that you aren't going to be quickly running an operation that's more expensive then a helo operation. That being said, maybe some areas could use this. Perhaps a place with canyons or cravasses, where people could fall down but rescuers could still mostly move rapidly using ground vehicles.

As far as the downwash, while it is a concern it's also something that can be managed. The heavier the aircraft (more equipment, endurance, and reliability) , the more downwash. This jetpack has a small down wash footprint (but I bet it's still really high under the jets since it's a pure thrust aircraft) but the tradeoff is in endurance and equipment.

But again, there might be some areas that could benefit from it, but I think it's a solution looking for a problem. Other than the gee wiz factor, I doubt any of the SAR agencies in the US would set up a system like this.

[ChuckMcM]

I don't disagree, and the same conversation happened when helicopters were first considered for SAR operations. My reading of your comment was that you dismissed as unlikely any application of the jet suits in a SAR role and I don't agree that there is no place or situation where these things make more sense than a helicopter. I was hoping to describe the parameters around where they would make sense.

[treetoppin]

What's cool about the history of helicopters is that people immediately recognized the ability of a helicopter to save lives, and then they promptly started doing so. The first helicopter flight was 1939,and the USCG's first life saved with a helo was 1944 with the delivery of blood plasma. So who knows, maybe this will pan out and with a few years folks with start saving lives with this technology.

I don't want to say that there isn't any application of this tool in a Sar role, but I don't think that this tool is any better than what organizations currently have available. It isn't a game changer, and it isn't going to save lives that would have otherwise been lost. If you wanted to save lives of hikers, you'd spend $400k on personal locator beacons and let people snag them at a ranger station for their hike. That would save more lives than a fancy suit I bet. While I can see there is a scenario where first responders say "wow I'm glad we had the jet pack in the back of the truck" I don't see it being worth the effort to get an agency to the point where every truck and crew has that capability without sacrificing any other capability.

[NoOneNew]

Hey, serious question related to this since you have a search/rescue background. How would you find the survivor in a mountainous area? Don't you have to use a helicopter anyways or if it's a ground party... wouldn't the whole jetpack thing be redundant 90% of the time since someone is already there?

I don't know the economics to search/rescue problems all that well, but I've always understood that the budget is essentially never enough. With such strained budgets, does it make sense to have something so niche and expensive? It's not like these things are going to be maintenance, license and cert free if implemented to a life saving capacity.

[treetoppin]

My experience is focused on finding people over water, but a lot of the tools will be the same. Using NVGs if we're at night to pick up any sort of light, our electro optical sensor that has thermal imaging capability, and good old fashioned headwork for guessing where a survivor might be located over terrain. A helicopter isn't always going to be the only airborne search asset, so it's possible to imagine a fixed wing search asset locating a survivor, and then a jetpack medic getting to them to provide triage care. The economics of search and rescue are really tricky, and it's expensive to maintain such a specialized capability with a profit motive in mind. I don't know the specifics of the UKs SAR system, but I am pretty sure they have a civilian organization running their maratime search and rescue, but I don't know if the bill is footed entirely by the government. Was your economics question about the jet pack or helicopter based search and rescue?

[elil17]

I agree that a jet pack isn’t as useful as a helicopter, but they are way, way cheaper. Medical helicopters cost millions of dollars and require expensive fuel and highly trained pilots. Jetpacks cost $100-300k, use a fraction of the fuel, and can be flown with a sports pilot license (much easier to acquire and maintain).

[treetoppin]

Good points, but remember we can't only compare the initial capital outlay, we have to compare the hourly operating cost. I imagine that it isn't quite as cheap as you think, and we would also need to see sustained operations from these jetpack to know what the hourly flight time cost is. This is amplified if you need 10 to 20 jetpack to cover and area that could be serviced by two helicopters that are being leased under a maintenance contract. As far as the pilot requirements, sure a jetpack might be able to be just a sport pilot, but can they operate in a commercial capablity then? The FAA says no. Also, this probably isn't trivial operations (search and rescue is highly dynamic, especially in mountainous, maritime, urban or poor weather conditions. On paper my flight experience is 500 hours and a commercial license, which isn't that hard to get as a rotary wing pilot. But in actuality it's 500 hours of highly expensive military flying in dangerous environments, to the tune of well over a million dollars of initial training. Just like a commercial EMS operator isn't going to hand the keys to a helicopter to anyone with a commercial rotary license, are you really going to have a jetpack medic be someone with the bare minimum of certification?

[treis]

>I agree that a jet pack isn’t as useful as a helicopter, but they are way, way cheaper. Medical helicopters cost millions of dollars and require expensive fuel and highly trained pilots. Jetpacks cost $100-300k, use a fraction of the fuel, and can be flown with a sports pilot license (much easier to acquire and maintain).

I'm not so sure I buy this. Maybe if you compare a jetpack with a helicopter capable of winching out the patient. But small 2 person helicopters are available new for the low 100s of thousands. I suspect they're more fuel efficient than a jet pack, but I don't have anything to back that up.

[hndamien]

A very capable autonomous passenger drone capable of 220kg payload is $400,000 - maybe this would make some sense?