WSJ Book Review: Jetpack Dreams

After the debacle at the 2008 AirVenture, this may be an interesting
look at the history of these devices.

* BOOKS
* OCTOBER 27, 2008

Great Idea, Limited Uplift
Years ago, Buck Rogers fans yearned to make the jetpack fantasy real.
Today, a few obsessed engineers keep trying.
By STEVE KEMPER

Last month, 49-year-old Swiss adventurer Yves Rossy strapped on a
jet-powered "wing suit" and jumped out of an airplane at more than 8,000
feet over Calais in France -- and then flew across the English Channel.
This impressive, daredevil feat, the result of years spent tinkering and
experimenting, could be considered a milestone in the decades-long
history of the jetpack. But Mr. Rossy leapt from an airplane, after all,
and the aim of jetpack designers has always been to come up with a
device that will blast off from your front yard and take you wherever
you want to go.

Mr. Rossy aside, jetpacks remain stuck in limbo, somewhere between
science and science fiction. They may occasionally whoosh to life for a
few thrilling seconds, but gravity and physics soon apply their usual
smackdown. Nevertheless, a few obsessed engineers and enthusiasts keep
trying to achieve lift-off. In

"Jetpack Dreams," Mac Montandon tours this wreckage-strewn territory and
sketches some of its fanatical inhabitants.

Jetpack Dreams
By Mac Montandon
(Da Capo, 261 pages, $25)

According to Mr. Montandon, jetpacks first zipped across the cultural
landscape in 1928 via a sci-fi story in a popular pulp magazine. The
flying device and its pilot, Captain Anthony Rogers -- whose first name
soon toughened into "Buck" -- caught the public's imagination and were
quickly rewarded with a comic strip that ran for decades.

A few Buck Rogers fans yearned to make the fantasy real. Some were
half-baked weekend Edisons, but several were talented research
scientists. At the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, Thiokol Chemical and,
most notably, Bell Aerospace, engineers inspired by Buck Rogers spent
years and fortunes designing jetpacks. Then as now, the contraptions
featured strap-on tanks filled with volatile fuel, usually hydrogen
peroxide, that powered thrusters for propelling the pilot skyward. Then
as now, most of the jetpacks flew about as well as ostriches.

The partial exception was the Rocket Belt, developed by an appealingly
monomaniacal engineer at Bell Aerospace named Wendell Moore. Mr.
Montandon tells this part of the story well. After Mr. Moore shattered
his kneecap in a crash, he surrendered the throttle to other test pilots
but kept refining the Rocket Belt. Success, when it finally arrived, was
modest: In April 1961, a pilot scudded 112 feet in 21 seconds. Mr. Moore
and others improved the device's maneuverability but couldn't extend
that 21-second duration. Funding dried up.

Mr. Montandon earnestly recounts the Rocket Belt's high points: an
exhibition for President Kennedy, cameos on the TV show "Lost in Space"
and in the 1965 James Bond movie "Thunderball" ("one of the most
profound pop culture touchstones for jetpack junkies," Mr. Montandon
writes), and a flight at the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics in
Los Angeles. The device was also popular at state fairs and sporting
events.

Mr. Montandon strains to portray these 21-second displays as triumphs
and the use of jetpacks in ads and videogames as significant cultural
markers. But in truth his examples show the jetpack dwindling from a
potentially world-shaking invention into a high-tech toy for
entertaining but irrelevant stunts.

Yet Mr. Montandon resists his own evidence and spends a large part of
the book searching for counter-proofs. In one of the better episodes, he
describes the first International Rocketbelt Convention, held in 2006,
where 150 of his fellow devotees talk about their obsession and listen
to reminiscences from aging Rocket Belt pilots. The eccentric highlight:
Pilot Hal Graham, now a contented lawnmower repairman, dons his old Bell
Aerospace suit and sings an original composition about jetpack pioneers,
accompanying himself on the ukulele.

Mr. Montandon also visits a number of current jetpack designers. He goes
to Trek Aerospace, whose one-person heli-jet has gobbled up $5 million
in Defense Department funding and grown to be 8 feet tall, 9 feet wide,
and 370 pounds; it can't fly. He tours the complex where Paul Moller's
Skycar has been in development for 45 years, at a cost of millions of
dollars, but still doesn't work. Juan Lozano, "the Mexican Rocket Man,"
has been testing a 22,000- horsepower rocket bike, but Mr. Montandon
finds him immobile in a La-Z-Boy, recovering from four broken ribs and
skinless thighs. The chapter ends with several pages about Mr.
Montandon's drunken excursion through restaurants, bars and a strip
club, culminating with his friend vomiting on a sidewalk.

Which brings up the book's debilitating flaw: Mr. Montandon's habit of
clogging the story with tedious details about himself, his family and
his friends, apparently in an effort to lend "Jetpack Dreams" a jauntily
charming tone. But we really don't need to know, for instance, that when
he drove to the Rocketbelt Convention in Buffalo he missed having his
morning coffee, left before 7 a.m. to beat traffic and had to swerve
(twice) while getting out of Brooklyn. Nor do we need to know that he
had lunch at "a semilegendary barbecue joint" while enroute. (He seems
incapable of eating without writing about it.)

Such irrelevancies congest the book from its first pages, where Mr.
Montandon also tries to inflate his other subject, jetpacks, into an
urgent quest: "Where's my jetpack? Whatever happened to what must surely
be the greatest promise never kept?" Alas, "Jetpack Dreams" seems like
another unkept promise, grounded by self-indulgence.