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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: December 6, 2015

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REAL LIFE NEWS: JETPACKS FOR DUBAI FIREFIGHTERS

by Hazed

A few weeks ago I told you about a new portable jetpack that might finally be fit for personal use. Well, here’s another jetpack story.

This time, it’s jetpacks for firefighters in Dubai. The plan is to give them jetpacks that will let them get to higher storeys of the skyscrapers the city is famous for – it has 196 high-rise buildings. When fires break out in any of them, winds fan the flames upwards.

So the firefighters are teaming up with manufacturer Martin Jetpack (that’s a company, not a person) to provide both manned and unmanned jetpacks, and Dubai’s Civil Defence nit is buying 20 of them.

These are not the portable ones I wrote about last time; they are more like flying chairs. They are powered by a V4 engine and can reach a top speed of 45mph, and climb up to 3,000ft – higher than Dubai’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa which is 2,700ft tall.

Lt Col Ali Almutawa from the city’s Civil Defence unit said the jetpacks would be used by first responders. “Sometimes we have challenges or difficulties to reach the top floors of those buildings,” he said. “The aircraft can go into confined spaces to size-up the situation. We are going to modify them with thermal imaging cameras”.

Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-11/13/firefighters-dubai-jetpacks-martin-jetpack

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