The Day Skeletons Attacked LAX
The government's record on assessing UFOs is getting sketchier every day.
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In October 2020, the news became lively with reports of a “guy in a jetpack” flying around in the traffic pattern at LAX, reported at 3000 feet.
Your first thought might be “Awesome!” followed by “Actually that could be pretty dangerous” followed by “That’s probably incredibly illegal.” You would be right on all counts. But what seemed to escape the news media was “That sounds wildly implausible.”
Today’s jetpacks, unlike the rocket powered ones of the 1970s that could run for about 1 minute, use very small turbojet engines to give better endurance and to prevent people from blowing up trying to refuel them. They fly for a few minutes at best and are used mostly for Instagram videos and Red Bull promotional events. Could one really get up to 3000 feet?
That is a very stretched maaaaaaybe. It’s also a “You’d be insane to try.” The best one available is the Jetpack Aviation JB11. Its specs give it a maximum flight time of 10 minutes with a service ceiling of 15,000 feet — those are under ideal conditions with a skinny, lightweight pilot. But understand what service ceiling means. It doesn’t mean you could take off from the ground at sea level, ascend to 15,000 feet, and come back down. You could never do that in only 10 minutes unless you wanted the ending part of your flight to be in freefall (and no, you cannot wear a parachute with one). It means you could take it up to Mt. Whitney (14,000 feet) and fly it around there. No safe/sane pilot would ever fly more than a few hundred feet up, allowing for the best opportunity for a safe landing in the event of a failure. There are good reasons that the videos you see of these flights online are almost always low and over water.
Although their climb rate is 2000 ft/min at sea level, this drops off rapidly the higher you get. Critical aircraft like this are super sensitive to density altitude. This is a factor of several things, mainly the actual altitude and the temperature, that defines how much air there is for the jets to bite. Up on Mt. Whitney, you could get off the ground on a cold day, but your climb rate would be very low indeed. On a hot day you probably couldn’t fly at all.
So, yes, a jetpack could get up to 3000 feet, if a pilot really wanted to push his luck. He would need to start back down immediately — a controlled descent is always slower than a Red Bull ascent for that Instagram reel. If you did make it to 3000 feet, you would have essentially no spare time at all to fly around and harry the airliners coming into the LAX approach pattern.
In June 2021, another “guy in a jetpack” was spotted once by the pilots of a passing business jet at 8000-9000 feet, “flying around in circles”. We can be quite certain this was a misidentification.
So, in short, a “guy in a jetpack” was, from the very beginning, among the least plausible explanations. It looked like a guy in a jetpack to the airliner pilots passing it at hundreds of miles an hour, so that’s what they reported, and their reports are what the FAA has recorded; but of course pilots’ split-second guesses mean very little.
The LAPD agreed, and sent a helicopter to go have a look (and again, by the time this came together, a jetpack would have long ago run out of fuel). What did they find? It was a Jack Skellington balloon, probably an escapee of a Halloween party.
Nevertheless, “guys in jetpacks” continued to be reported: another that same month at 6000 feet, in July 2021 at 5000 feet. And they continue. They’re probably not all Jack Skellington balloons, but as there are countless balloons shaped like people you can buy, they don’t all have to be. There are two things we can say for sure about “guys in jetpacks” harassing airplanes: (1) At least one of them was Jack Skellington; and (2) Probably none of them have been guys in jetpacks.
(At the time of publication, JetPack Aviation had not replied to a request for comment.)