Seven prototype jetpacks went up for sale in 2021 as part of the company’s liquidation. Except the release ended up getting delayed, and then the company “ wound up research, development, and operations in 2019,” according to the New Zealand publication Stuff. It’s hoping to develop a simpler commercial model for sale to the general public by 2015, with a price tag around $100,000,” Will wrote.

“he approval paves the way for the company to try to meet its stated goal of selling its first jetpacks to the military, first responders, and other authorities by the end of 2014. In 2013, Will Oremus wrote for Slate that New Zealand had approved the use of jetpacks, at least in a very limited sense: Martin Aircraft was granted a permit to test a prototype (which was actually not a jetpack per se but a pack that used a ducted fan lift).

In that sense, jetpacks have made something of a comeback over the past decade or so. Jetpacks only really work as an exceptional form of transportation, not a standard one.

Wouldn’t operators keep colliding with one another? We’d just end up with roads of a sort anyway, with jerks constantly trying to fly above us like those drivers who think they are beating the system when they drive along the shoulder for two miles in a bad traffic jam? Imagine how many bugs would fly up your nose unless you wore a facemask at all times. And we were promised jetpacks this is not right.’ And I wrote that on the L train.”) … I was on the subway thinking, ‘You know, Manhattan is so close-I live in Brooklyn-and it is such a pain to get there. I don’t have-no, I don’t have a jetpack.” (She told NPR’s Weekend Edition, “I started writing that song right before the millennium. I just have this token and a head full of stars. In 2005, singer-songwriter Jill Sobule released a song called “ Jet Pack” that says, “Oh, I don’t have a jetpack. It’s just four silly little 17 year-olds that needed to come up with a band name,” one member said in an interview. Unhelpfully, the members claim they don’t really remember how they came up with the name. Tracking down the history of the phrase is complicated by the fact that there is an indie Scottish rock band named We Were Promised Jetpacks, which was founded in 2003. Or, the active variation: They promised us jetpacks. Whenever a useless new gadget makes the rounds of the internet, there’s this phrase that pops up: We were promised jetpacks.

Timeless Desire by Torie N. James