The company-manufacturer of the first commercial knapsack for flights successfully entered the stock exchange.

Latest Knapsack Version

The company of the New Zealand inventor Glen Martin, Martin Aircraft, successfully entered the Australian Stock Exchange and collected an IPO of 100 million Australian dollars. The company is promoting the world's first commercial jetpack Martin Jetpack .

Although the knapsack is called the “jetpack” (jet), it works on a 200-horsepower four-valve gasoline engine that rotates two tunnel propellers. The knapsack is able to stay in the air for up to 30 minutes, travel at a speed of up to 74 km / h, rise to 1,500 meters in height and lift to 120 kilograms of usable weight. The cost of the device will be 225 thousand Australian dollars (200,000 USD).


Knapsack version from 2011
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The idea of ​​creating a satchel Martin caught fire in 1981. As he himself tells, he did not count on quick success. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States financed the development of such satchels for military purposes, but did not achieve anything. And Martin was working on his satchel in the garage in the evenings after work.

Nevertheless, he managed to build a successful prototype. In 2004, after a demonstration video appeared on the Internet, in which the satchel lifts his wife up, the founder of one of the New Zealand venture funds, who became the first investor of the startup, drew attention to the project. On the eve of the IPO, Martin received funding from the Chinese firm Kuang-Chi Science for a total of 50 million.