FOR A FEW DECADES, jet packs seemed to be everywhere: on Gilligan’s Island, Lost in Space, Thunderball, and even at the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympics. Inventors promised we’d all be flying with them now, enabling us to zoom around effortlessly in the sky and getting us to work without traffic jams and trains. But what’s the jet pack’s real story?

In The Great American Jet Pack, Steve Lehto gives us a definitive answer, explaining how the technology arose, how it works, and why we don’t have jet packs in our garages today.

These individual lift devices, as they were blandly labeled by the government men who financed much of their development, answered man’s desire to simply step outside and take flight. While airplanes and helicopters required trained pilots to work levers, pedals, joysticks, and yokes, the individual lift devices often had nothing more than a handle or two—the pilot simply leaned or twisted in the direction he wanted to travel. No runways, no wings, no pilot’s licenses were required. Soaring through the air with the wind in your face and landing anyplace there was room to stand—could this be done? Yes, it could be, and it was.

Yet the jet pack turned out to be the most overpromised technology of our time.

From the rocket belt to the jet belt to the flying platform and all the way to Yves Rossy’s 21st-century free flights using a jet-powered wing, this book delves into the technology that made these devices possible, and the reasons why they never became commercial successes on a mass scale. It profiles the inventors and pilots, the hucksters and cheats, the businessmen and soldiers who were involved with these machines. And it finally tells a great American story of a technology whose promise may, one day, yet come to fruition.

STEVE LEHTO is the author of Chrysler’s Turbine Car: The Rise and Fall of Detroit’s Coolest Creation, Drawn to Injustice: The Wrongful Conviction of Timothy Masters, and Death’s Door: The Truth Behind Michigan’s Largest Mass Murder, among others. His articles have been published by the Huffington Post, Michigan History, and other publications. He practices law in Southeast Michigan.

Jacket design: John Yates at Stealworks.com
Cover photograph: Eric Scott over Denver, courtesy of Go Fast!

Printed in the United States of America