Don’t Call It A Jet Pack: Here’s How The Pentagon Is Finally Getting Troops To Fly

Source: Fast Company, Jared Keller
Photo: Bettmann / Contributor/Getty Images

The government has sought jet packs for U.S. service members for decades. Now its chief military R&D agency is working with five companies to develop electric flight options to help take elite troops to new heights during complex missions.

The U.S. military is poised to take American service members to new heights—literally.

Fast Company has learned that the Defense Department is actively testing brand-new, all-electric personal flight systems with the help of a handful of defense contractors. These systems will purportedly make individual troops capable of independent flight without requiring a lift from transport aircraft to reach their target, finally fulfilling the Pentagon’s decades-long dream of making “all foot soldiers look like Buck Rogers,” as Life magazine once put it. Just don’t call it a “jet pack.”

Initiated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—the Pentagon’s deep research and development arm—in 2021, the so-called Portable Personal Air Mobility System (PPAMS) program envisions a lightweight one-man flight system capable of operating at low to medium altitudes and ranges of up to five kilometers, according to DARPA’s initial solicitation for prototypes. At the time, the agency said it was interested in testing personal flight technology like “jet packs, powered gliders, powered wingsuits, and powered parafoils.”

The genesis of the device comes down to a specific problem: how do you get a single U.S. service member into and out of a contested environment quickly and quietly, without alerting potential enemies? The DARPA solicitation proposes employing the PPAMS for several special missions sets, including logistics, urban operations, combat search and rescue, and the rapid and stealthy infiltration and exfiltration of U.S. special operations forces into hostile territory where traditional helicopters or aircraft might stick out like a sore thumb. American commandos would drop in, execute their mission, and fly out with no one the wiser.

While the PPAMS effort has been well-documented since its inception, Fast Company has learned that DARPA is now officially assessing five prototype flight kits from five different companies under Phase II of the program, all of which are “at various stages of testing from tethered tests to prototype flights,” an agency spokesman tells Fast Company. (“Tethered tests” involve remotely operating a flight system that’s attached to a stationary object, while “prototype flights” refers to conventional manned testing.)

These PPAMS flight prototypes were developed by American defense contractors Skypad, Morsecorp, Triton Systems, Cornerstone Research Group, and Lynntech, to which DARPA awarded five separate contracts for $1.5 million apiece through the U.S. government’s Small Business Innovation Research program in 2023. While details regarding the prototypes are scant, the program is explicitly departing from the Pentagon’s past focus on jet propulsion devices like the traditional jet pack in favor of electric alternatives: According to a DARPA spokesman, the agency is “primarily working on electric-solutions [sic], which makes a jet pack unlikely.”

Indeed, while DARPA previously awarded Phase I contracts to Skypad and defense contractor Airbouyant for all-electric jet pack systems in 2021 to examine the feasibility of the PPAMS concept, jet-powered vehicles proved too noisy for potential mission sets. Just one year later, then-DARPA Tactical Technology Office program manager Alexander Walan told Aviation Week that the agency was “interested in something that is much more mobile, lightweight, small, compact [and] suitable for military missions.” (Walan, who now works for defense technology upstart Anduril, did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.)

Contract information for the PPAMS program reflects this push for so-called electric individual lift devices. Morsecorp’s publicly available proposal involves the development of the so-called “RAPTOR-2,” or Rapid Assembly Paramotor for Tactical Operator Relocation, as an “all-electric paraglider.” Similarly, Lynntech’s proposal involves an “advanced powered paraglider” called “CHARIOT,” or Connector High-speed Aerial Resupply/Insertion Over-the-horizon Transport. (Details regarding Skypad, Triton Systems, and Cornerstone Research Group’s proposed PPAMS prototypes were not immediately available in their public SBIR contracts. Skypad and Cornerstone Research Group declined to comment, while Triton Systems, Morsecorp, and Lynntech did not respond to repeated requests for additional information.)

The PPAMS program may result turbine-assisted leap forward for the U.S. military’s longtime individual lift ambitions, but it also signals an end to the vision of militarized jet packs that has persisted in defense circles since the 1950s. After decades of failed individual lift experiments, the Pentagon appears to have finally come to a simple realization: In order for the PPAMS to fly, the military’s jet pack dreams have to crash and burn first.

The Army-Navy Hiller VZ-1 Pawnee “Flying Platform” during an undated test. The Hiller was one of the U.S. military’s first attempts at a powered individual lift device. [Photo: Transferred from the United States Department of the Army and the United States Department of the Navy/National Air and Space Museum] The dream of flying warfighters has been a fixture of the American imagination for the better part of a century. While the idea of the “rocket pack” dates back to Russian physicist Alexander Andreev’s 1919 methane-and-oxygen-powered concept, it was Buck Rogers—the beloved science fiction space adventurer and fixture of American daily newspapers since 1929—and his antigravity “jump belt” that introduced the jet pack in particular to America’s cultural vocabulary as the ideal vision of individual lift. The jet pack wasn’t the U.S. military’s first powered individual lift device—the failed joint Army-Navy Hiller VZ-1 Pawnee “Flying Platform” of the early 1950s holds that dubious honor by a few years—but it has certainly become the Pentagon’s most popular one.

Indeed, the U.S. military’s individual lift ambitions first truly took flight on a clear afternoon in October 1961 at Fort Bragg (today Fort Liberty) in North Carolina, where the President John F. Kennedy watched as Harold Graham, an engineer for defense contractor Bell Aerosystems, stood atop a landing ship that was floating in the center of a nearby lake and strapped on an bulky metallic backpack dubbed the the Small Rocket Lift Device (or, colloquially, the “Bell Rocket Belt”). Suddenly, in a burst of smoke, Graham’s feet left the deck of the ship, his body floating above the water as he hovered toward the shore, a great plume of water stirred up in his wake. The flight was short, just 13 seconds, but Graham landed safely on a sandy embankment before Kennedy, turned to the commander-in-chief, and delivered a crisp salute.

An Army officer present for the demonstration later told the Buffalo Evening News that Kennedy sat “wide eyed and open mouthed, just like a kid.”

The Rocket Belt represented the U.S. military’s first real attempt at developing an one-man flight system for American troops, and the public fascination with it would help establish the jet pack as the Pentagon’s ideal individual lift device. But despite the public fascination with the Rocket Belt following the Kennedy demonstration, the Army scrapped development of the system due to noise and fuel storage constraints that limited flight times to less than a minute, limiting its tactical utility. The Rocket Belt became something of a novelty in the following years, appearing in the James Bond film Thunderball and taking flight at major events like the first Super Bowl in 1967.

The U.S. military made several other attempts at individual lift devices in following decades. They included the DARPA-supported family of Light Mobility Systems of 1967, which included the one-man turbine-powered “Jet Belt” and two-man “POGO” flying platform in 1967; the two-man “flying Jeep” of the Marine Corps’ Small Tactical Aerial Mobility Platform program in the 1970s; and the Army’s turbine-powered Williams Aerial Systems Platform II of the 1980s. But like their Rocket Belt predecessors, those efforts proved noisy, expensive, and tactically underwhelming – and never proceeded past the testing stage.

Still, the U.S. military’s individual lift aspirations have persisted, as has its particular jet pack fixation. In 2001, DARPA funded the development of Millennium Jet’s SoloTrek XFV Exo-Skeletor Flying Vehicle, a single-person VTOL craft powered by two backpack-mounted ducted fans, as a potential electric jetpack. As recently as 2019, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was pursuing a turbine engine-powered jet pack from California-based JetPack Aviation for potential applications for the military’s most elite operators, although the command “did not end up testing a prototype” following exploratory discussions with the company, SOCOM spokesman Navy Cmdr. Joe Vermette told Fast Company—discussions which “highlighted characteristics that limited its utility for [SOCOM] in what would be a niche capability.”

The American public may remain fascinated by the prospect of jet pack troops whizzing across future battlefields, but the new details of the PPAMS program reflect a realignment of the Pentagon’s individual lift ambitions. Modern jet packs, despite the airborne agility and maneuverability they purportedly offer, remain too conspicuous and too cumbersome to make tactical sense in a combat situation. Should the PPAMS prototypes succeed during testing, the system will likely only see limited use among U.S. special operations forces, those elite commandos tasked with the most complex missions that conventional forces aren’t equipped to handle.

But where the Pentagon has so far failed to produce a functional jet pack, private industry has picked up the slack. Gravity Industries, founded by British inventor and former U.K. Royal Marine Richard Browning, is the most notable example, with his Daedalus Flight Pack currently under consideration by the British armed forces and other “special operations customers” following much-hyped tactical demonstrations. Then there’s innovations like the Jetwing, a rigid-winged, jet-powered flight suit with a purported range of up to 50 kilometers that made news in 2015 by flying alongside a commercial airliner in the skies above Dubai. The jet pack is alive and well, just not for the American military—for now.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91109459/pentagon-darpa-flying-troops