[imagesource:here]

It all started in August last year when two airline pilots, landing at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on August 30, spotted “a guy in a jetpack” flying off their wing while on final approach to the airport.

Within a minute, another pilot flying JetBlue Flight 23 also reported seeing a “person” fly past.

This wasn’t ideal.

Landing is generally considered more hazardous and requires more exacting handling than taking off, so someone zooming around in your flight path is a hazard.

He was then spotted again by pilots flying a China Airlines plane, on October 14, at an approximate altitude of 6 000 feet, about seven miles northwest of the airport.

Then in December, someone managed to get video footage of the mysterious man:

Now, new documents, picked up by Gizmodo, seem to have shed some light on who, or rather what, ‘jetpack guy’ is.

The documents come from The Black Vault, a home for weird declassified military documents. Some of the documents about the ‘jetpack guy’ incident apparently show correspondence between Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials and air traffic officials.

One thing that stands out is testimony from one of the pilots who saw ‘jetpack guy’ in August, and who said that he looked identical to a dummy-carrying drone he’d seen on YouTube.

“Mike Bumberger, our LEAP [Law Enforcement Assistance Program] Agent shared that the FBI interviewed the American Airlines pilot that made the jetpack sighting,” writes John Blanco, the Aviation Safety Manager at the Los Angeles Flight Standards District Office, in an email to FAA officials.

“The pilot said what he saw was exactly like the drone in the YouTube video below.”

That YouTube video, if you’re interested:

Yeah, I can see it.

It also makes sense when you take the technology and physics into account.

After all, while jetpacks have existed since the 1960s, they are generally expensive, temperamental (they have been known to explode), and require a lot of energy to maintain a person.

Typically, people fly them at very low elevations—or at high elevations for very short periods of time. Indeed, Jetpack Aviation—which has a product can take you 15,000 feet in the air—can only do it for about 10 minutes.

Dummies and drones on the other hand are inexpensive and light.

What remains unclear is why someone would be doing this in the first place, and doing it around an airport, where it could lead to catastrophe.

One thing’s for sure – when they find that drone operator, he’s going to be in a lot of trouble.

[source:gizmodo]