[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.