By Kevin Purdy/purdyk@gnnewspaper.com
People who think they have airport security horror stories to tell should try walking a few miles in Eric Scott’s shoes.
Or, better yet, try flying for a few seconds in his rocketbelt.
Until recently, when flying to one of his many gigs around the country as the Go Fast! Rocketman, Scott would separate his rocketbelt into two cases before flying and bring along a detailed explanation of his profession.
“At first, it was kind of cool,” Scott said. “You’d hear, ‘Mr. Scott, please come to the ticket counter,’ and someone would come up and ask, ‘Your luggage, sir ... what, exactly, is it?’ ”
When Scott arrived in Niagara Falls Friday, his harness and multi-gallon tanks of hydrogen peroxide arrived on a separate cargo plane — all so he could spend what will likely be a total of one minute and 30 seconds in the air over a three-day weekend.
What began life as an ambitious project at Niagara Falls’ Bell Aerosystems more than 50 years ago has morphed into a two-day convention, one that celebrates the originators of the device that brought science fiction to life and showcases the modern-day projects to replicate its success — and, in some cases, expand upon it.
Kathleen Lennon Clough, one of the organizers of the first International rocketbelt Convention held in September 2006, said what started as a short-notice gathering that intended to bring together the rocketbelt’s original pilots and designers has grown at the speed of the Internet into a quirky attraction with global reach.
“We pulled together last year’s convention in less than five months ... but we had enthusiasts coming in from Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, all over,” she said. “PBS came and did a show on it, Canada’s History Television, (Web log) BoingBoing, Make magazine, Space.com did a story ... it seemed to get on a lot of blogs, and it just grew from there.”
As part of this weekend’s Thunder of Niagara Air Show at the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station, this year’s convention has the chance to expose thousands of flight enthusiasts to what was once a relatively small footnote in the history of Niagara Falls aeronautics innovation.
If they stop by on Sunday afternoon, they’ll have a chance to meet test pilots William Suitor, who helped organize the festival, and Harold Graham, the man who performed the first free flight in a rocket pack on April 20, 1961. Graham was just 4 feet off the ground and flew 108 feet in 13 seconds, but that was enough time to ponder a lot of things.
“Not the least of which are, at the end of these 15 seconds, am I going to be landing safely or still in the air?” Graham said earlier this week. “It had its dark parts, it had its brief glimpses of glory, but the overriding factor was always looking, always thinking, ‘What can I do to make this a safe flight?’ ”
Hugh Neeson, a former vice president of Bell Aerospace and current trustee of the Niagara Falls Aerospace Museum, notes that nobody has been known to die in a rocketbelt. Only one person has experienced major injury during flight — namely its chief developer, Wendall Moore — and the rocket pack itself, developed from the small jets used to steady Bell’s famous sound-barrier-breaking X-1 rocket plane, emits only extremely hot steam rather than harmful exhaust.
The rocketbelt was born in large part from Bell’s allowance of free-ranging innovation, of giving engineers “the chance to try things out,” Neeson said. Moore’s inimitable personality moved both the rocketbelt and its succesor, the “Jet Belt,” forward through numerous tests and improvements.
While the “jet belt,” basically a turbo jet engine built to a human’s size, flew for up to five minutes in April 1969, both it and the rocketbelt were determined by the Pentagon to be too complicated, expensive and short-range for any useful deployment. After Moore died of a heart attack in May 1969, both projects were all but officially finished.
Moore’s invention lived on in any big production that wanted to add 30 seconds of high-science spectacle, however. The James Bond movie “Thunderball,” the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the 1984 Summer Olympics and other events have all drawn some form of rocketbelt demonstrations, and countless science fiction shows and video games have ensured the appeal of “jet packs” among those too young to remember the original widely-shown demonstrations.
Still, Neeson, like Graham, is a bit taken aback by the attention and efforts put into furthering a device that was long ago determined impractical by both the armed forces and Bell itself.
“The inherent laws of chemistry and physics of the problem ... of keeping a man in the air under the pure power of thrust, that tells you that you can’t get a lot more duration out of this,” Neeson said. “I loved the first (rocketbelt convention) ... the effort being invested in it, though, is a bit puzzling.”
Not to Lennon Clough. She said she’s heard from at least six people since the first convention who claim to be working on operational rocket packs, and has helped connect modern-day enthusiasts to the still-living employees from Bell’s heyday.
Clough’s father, Tom Lennon, was senior photographer and cinematographer at Bell Aerosystems and made a few flights of his own in testing rigs. By exploring the rocketbelt project, she’s come to learn more about her father than she’d ever expected.
“I’ve seen pictures of my father flying for the first time just this year,” she said. “I’ve had eight reels of film he shot given to me ... it’s a part of him I never expected to see again, and it’s great to have it.”
For rocket pilot Eric Scott, whatever free time he has between flights promoting the Go Fast! energy drink and sportswear label and the serious set-up required for them will be spent meeting the creators of the device that keeps him afloat.
“I want to meet the greats that went before me, the first guys to get in their rocketbelts and head up,” Scott said. “I just want to say, ‘You guys rock’ ... and maybe show them my own pack.”
