Engineer Develops Personal Helicopter

Aug. 31 -- If Mike Moshier has his way, one of these days we’ll be able to strap on our personal flying machine, zip straight up into the air, and then zoom across the countryside and land just about anyplace we want.

After all, James Bond could do it with his Rocket Belt in the movie Thunderball, so why can’t the rest of us?

That fanciful device used by 007 was only good for a 20-second flight. But that was enough to fuel the imagination of dreamers like Moshier, who have yearned for a personal flying machine that could take off and land like a helicopter ever since the days of Leonardo Da Vinci.

The fact that no one has had much success at it would discourage most folks, but to Moshier, a combat pilot in Vietnam, that just made it all the more challenging. And next month his dream will move closer to reality when NASA begins testing his SoloTrek XFV in the space agency’s wind tunnel at Ames Research Center in northern California.

“When we first started this, I was joking around, asking why somebody hasn’t already done this,” Moshier says.

But after 12 years of thinking about it and four years of hard work, he knows why now. It’s really hard to build a rocket belt.

Helicopter Without Its Skin

So Moshier’s contraption doesn’t look, act, or work like a rocket belt. Instead, it looks more like a helicopter without a skin, and it relies on tried and tested technologies of modern aviation.

The Rocket Belt was developed as a personal aircraft in the 1960s by Wendell Moore, an engineer at Bell Aerospace, but it wasn’t commercially viable. It flew a few times in county fairs, and had its brief moment in the spotlight in the Bond movie. It was powered by hydrogen peroxide that squirted out the jets with a shriek so loud it had to be dubbed out of the soundtrack.

SoloTrek runs on ordinary automotive gasoline, and it’s about as noisy as a lawn mower.Moore eventually got the Rocket Belt up to a flying time of 30 seconds, but that still wasn’t enough to make it practical.