[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?