butseriously.com: Jetpacks

Where the hell is my Jetpack?
by
Brian Malow

Buck Rogers, James Bond and Johnny Quest.

What do these three men -- or, two men and a smooth young animated boy -- have in common? Well, besides their badass names, in the course of their fantastic adventures, each had the opportunity to fly a jetpack. Aren't you jealous? We know you are; don't lie. Every kid on Earth, from Rhode Island to Yugoslavia, has fantasized about tooling around in a jetpack. We've done it. You've done it. It's genetic.

Not to pour salt on the wound, but let's add one more rocket man to that list: Bill Suitor. If his name doesn't ring a bell, that's understandable -- he doesn't have quite the PR department the other guys have. But he has one very significant thing over all of them: He's not fictional, and neither is the Bell Labs Rocket Belt that he's flown over 1200 times.

How does somebody get a job like that?

According to Suitor, "It was nepotism personified. The inventor, Wendell Moore, was a neighbor of ours. I used to cut his lawn."

Could it be that simple?

Wendell Moore was an engineer at Bell Aerospace. He'd previously come up with the idea of putting small rocket thrusters on the nose and wingtips of the Bell X-1 and X-2 rocket planes, the ones Chuck Yeager used to break the sound barrier. The thrusters were necessary for altitude control because in the thin air of the upper atmosphere, the flight control surfaces weren't reacting like they should. While working on that project, he imagined taking a couple of those small rocket motors and strapping them to a man's body. Bell obtained a contract to develop the technology.

"The army contract that the original rocket belt was being developed for stated that they had to take someone of average draft age with no flight experience and teach them to fly it. In 1964," explains Suitor, "I was 19 years old and going to school but not happy with school. Wendell said, 'How would you like a job doing this?' and it sure beat everything else I was doing at the time."

So, basically, his qualifications were his young age and a complete lack of experience. Talk about your lucky breaks. Bill Suitor was about to become one of a handful of men who know what it's like to fly.

The belt itself is a backpacklike contraption that weighs about 120 pounds and has tanks of hydrogen peroxide and nitrogen. The nitrogen pushes the hydrogen peroxide propellant into a chamber where it mixes violently with a catalyst, producing a high-pressure steam that flows out the twin nozzles to provide thrust. The rocket tubes are about a foot away from the pilot, on each side, slightly angled away from the body. The steam exits the tubes at about 1000 degrees Fahrenheit, so, "You learn in a helluva hurry to keep your feet out of there."

The machine is also extremely loud, generating a shrill, ear-piercing 130-decibel whine, and it is all but impossible to control. "About the best way to describe it is standing on a big beach ball in a swimming pool. Once you get the hang of it, it's like anything else. It's like riding a bicycle, you know, if you can remember how hard that was at first. And then, all of a sudden, you catch on, and that's it."

Bill Suitor's training began in an aircraft hangar with approximately 60 feet of headroom. Until he learned how to balance and fly the belt, he was on a tether: a small steel cable and a pulley system. The cable is hooked to a bracket on the belt and goes up to a trolley far overhead. Then the cable is fed down to a couple of big strong men who act as spotters.

Even on a tether, the rocket belt could be dangerous. "The very first fella to try it was Wendell, but before the steel cable on the tether, they used a small nylon rope. And he got into a wild gyration in the hangar while he was trying the very first one and got tangled up in the rope when he was about 8 or 10 feet off the concrete floor. The hot rocket tube melted the rope, and he dropped to the floor and broke his knees."

During his years at Bell, from 1964 to 1970, Bill Suitor was one of three pilots that traveled around demonstrating the belt and testing the different versions, which all had one severe limitation: the amount of fuel they could carry.

"Twenty-one and a half seconds was the maximum flight duration," Suitor explains. "It used up about six gallons of fuel in that time. The rocket motor consumes a quart and a half per second, so it doesn't win any EPA mileage awards."

Impractical for most purposes, the rocket belt was put to spectacular use in the entertainment business. Still relatively new to the public, it appeared in the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball. In the opening teaser, Bond straps it on, saying, "No well-dressed man should be without one." He then proceeds to blast off in a maelstrom of swirling dust.

Of course, it wasn't Sean Connery performing the flight. It was Bill Suitor and fellow stunt man Gordon Yeager. Multiple takes were used to make it appear to be a longer flight. Suitor says, "I get all the credit all the time for that Thunderball flight, but what you see there is some of Gordon and some of myself. There were six flights made, and he did three and I did three."

They also dubbed in the sound of a CO2 fire extinguisher instead of using the actual high-pitched whine.

The true era of the rocket belt was brief. By 1969, the country was caught up in Vietnam and the Apollo Program, and Bell Labs was going under. Funding for the rocket belt -- and a later air-breathing jet engine device that could run for 20 minutes -- was no longer available. In Suitor's words, "It just died on the vine. Kinda sad."

But in 1970, Bill Suitor was contacted by another brilliant and eccentric engineer, Nelson Tyler, inventor of the vibration-free helicopter camera mount that has been used extensively in the film and television industries, earning him an Academy Award for technical achievement.

Tyler had built his own rocket belt, a duplicate of the Bell device, and he wanted Suitor to fly it.

"We did the first halftime show for the first Superbowl, and then the first Pro Bowl, but the best one for me was the Olympics, the Opening Ceremony in the '84 Olympics."

By 1984, Suitor hadn't flown in some four years and had gained about 20 pounds. He tried to pass the job off on someone else, a younger pilot that he had trained, but Nelson wanted him. "So we took a couple practice hops in a park the day before the rehearsal, and then Thursday we did the rehearsal flight, and it went well, but I could really feel the difference with carrying the extra weight and being rusty."

Although he'd never had an accident, with 110,000 people sitting in the LA Coliseum -- including Ronald Reagan up in the press booth -- and a television audience of two and a half billion, Suitor started to get a bit nervous. "I said to myself, 'Aw, jeez, not now, stupid. Don't go on your ass now... of all the times...' I started thinking about that, but I made it."

The response, as always, was tremendous because "not only was the thing very loud, but it's just such a shock to see someone flying through the air with no visible means of support."

Bill flew again in 1995, at a celebration party for the Houston Rockets during the NBA Championship series. The company that hired him, American Flying Belt, had big future plans, but they ended scandalously. One of the partners was murdered. Another partner was a suspect in the crime. There were lawsuits, and the rocket belt itself disappeared.

And that's about where the story ends. Two of the original Bell Labs Rocket Belts are now gathering dust in New York. One is exhibited -- along with photos, jumpsuits and other equipment -- at the Science Museum of Buffalo, the other at the Engineering Department of the University of Buffalo.

With its limited flight time, it seems the personal consumer model rocket belt is destined to remain a pipe dream (along with the flying car, giant mechanical hands and a good Star Wars prequel), barring some unforeseen breakthroughs in miniature rocket technology.

But if somebody out there would like to build the next-generation jetpack, you're gonna need a seasoned pilot. Let us recommend Bill Suitor, the most experienced Rocket Man on planet Earth. His 1200 flights over the past 35 years have given him about six and a half hours of rocket belt flight time.

What's it like? "For me, the greatest thrill flying the thing is to see my shadow on the ground beneath me. Chasing my shadow. I always got a big kick out of that."