According to the JetPack Aviation CEO, David Mayman, the firm is in contact with the Air Race World Championship team on initiating a world-first race series in September that would involve pilots of jetpack competing on parallel aerial obstacle courses. Air Race World Championship is the new name of the Red Bull Air Race Competition, which ended in 2019 to establish a parallel jetpack racing series.
“Some of the folks they’re thinking about are young racers, people with motorcycle experience, Dakar [motorsports rally] experience, that sort of thing,” the Mayman told New Atlas, adding that he’s “been very clear that [JetPack Aviation will] get the ultimate say on who gets to fly.”
Mayman has mentioned that the race would involve a “series of pylons, rings, and hoops” and would take place over water. For safety reasons, air racing is pretty much impossible to do head-to-head, but the small size of jetpacks and the obstacles is an indication of the fact that the two or even three parallel courses can be put out next to each other over a body of water and racers can have races simultaneously.
“The obstacles will be vertical as well as horizontal,” he told New Atlas. “You’ll have to go under this and over that, through this ring and around this pylon.”
JetPack Aviation allows the “select participants” to test their jetpacks after two days of training. In his interview with “New Atlas”, Mayman acknowledged that if the Air Race deal goes through he will have a lot of jetpacks to make and pilots to train. He said, “At the moment we’re talking about launching around September, so we need to build another six machines and train about 30 new pilots, which we’ll then whittle down to ten.”
Mayman noted that his company spent about 70% of its resources on the completion of three orders. One for a private consumer and the other two for Southeast Asian militaries. It is uncertain whether the company would be able to fulfill the promise or not.