Xplane11.35b Various VTOL

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Various VTOL.  One is a payware 2-place copter made in Europe in real life, the other a jetpack inspired from Lost In Space and the real life jetpacks that date into the 60's.  Last pic is a screenshot made from a rare Lost In Space TV episode, episode four of the series, before it became too campy.  The first five or six Lost In Space episodes were very good Sci Fi melodrama, I always thought, having seen them when they originally aired back in the early to mid 60's. 

I should mention the jetpack can be downloaded for free from VSkylab's site, and is a great VTOL aircraft capable of zero speed takeoffs and landings for those who find copters too challenging in Xplane, or P3D.

John

Edited June 19, 2019 by John_Cillis

[P_7878 6,554]

Interesting SIMs here...Jetpacks are really curious inventions...and, yes, as you've noted, prevalent in fiction and reality since the 60s...

Do recall seeing this device help the James Bond escape...in one of the movies....

[John_Cillis 2,406]

2 hours ago, P_7878 said:

.....Do recall seeing this device help the James Bond escape...in one of the movies....

It was also used in some sports events, they could only fly for a minute or less as they burned fuel at a feverish pace, so someone would takeoff just outside the stadium and land to the roar of the crowd inside the stadium, just before the fuel would run out.  They say the 1969 Apollo Lunar Module was seconds from running out of fuel, because the original landing target would have put it inside a crater, so they had to fly around it.  If you hear the replay of that landing on youtube you can discern what was happening even though we who watched the landing did not know it at the time and just assumed (luckily) that Neil and Buzz would get the job done....  Poor Michael Collins must have been the most stressed of all, wondering if his mates would ever return to him in the mothership.

John