Jet Suits and Flyboards Edge Closer to the Battlefield as Armies Explore New Mobility Solutions
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The broader defense community is beginning to treat individual flight systems as more than experimental curiosities, examining how short-range personal air mobility could fit within emerging doctrines for distributed and agile operations. Progress in reliability and sustainment will determine whether these platforms evolve from demonstration tools to genuine mission enablers.
What began as an airshow demonstration is now edging into potential operational reality. Around the world, military planners are rethinking personal flight not as fantasy but as a tactical advantage that could redefine how troops move in complex terrain or across contested littorals. This is what French General Bruno Baratz said to an interviewer focused on innovation on October 26, 2025. The latter believes that solutions similar to the Flyboard Air from French start-up Zapata will soon be operational on the battlefield, as the need for speed and mobility increases, as demonstrated by the war in Ukraine. In April 2024, DARPA confirmed it is evaluating five prototype Portable Personal Air Mobility System kits for military use, signaling that the Pentagon’s appetite for individual lift devices is moving from curiosity to structured testing.Follow Army Recognition on Google News at this link
A Royal Marine tests a Gravity Industries jet suit during a boarding exercise. Jet-powered individual lift devices, like these, are emerging as potential tools for special operations, offering rapid ship-to-shore and urban insertion capabilities despite current limitations in endurance and payload (Picture source: Gravity Industries).
As the United States pushes PPAMS forward, a small cohort of European startups is racing to shape the category. UK-based Gravity Industries says it has “tens of millions” in potential contracts on the table with two armed forces, a claim that underscores how rapidly the defense market for jet-powered suits is maturing from demos to funded trials. The company’s multi-turbine “jet suit” has appeared in Royal Navy boarding experiments and earlier reporting puts endurance at roughly five minutes for a 170-pound pilot on jet fuel or kerosene. Gravity’s founder argues that is already “enough time to make a surprise boarding on a ship,” a mission where seconds matter and ladders or fast-ropes introduce delay and exposure.
France’s Franky Zapata offers a different approach: a compact flyboard powered by five micro-jet turbines. The company describes Flyboard Air as “the smallest redundant manned aircraft ever built,” and public feats have shown both performance and risk management, from the Bastille Day parade flight to a successful English Channel crossing on 4 August 2019 after a failed first attempt ten days earlier. The platform’s stabilization and system redundancy pitch directly to military gatekeepers who worry about controllability during high-consequence insertions.
For commanders, the tactical promise of jet-suits and fly-boards sits in the last tactical mile. ILDs create a fast, vertical path where boats and helicopters telegraph presence or struggle with geometry. In maritime interdictions, an operator can lift off from a RIB and plant on a suspect vessel’s deck without a ladder or hoist, compressing the timeline from detection to seizure and reducing the window for adversaries to jettison contraband or mobilize small arms. In urban fights, ILDs offer rooftop-to-rooftop movement that bypasses choke points, roadblocks, and improvised explosive threats. In mountain terrain, they enable short, precise hops over gaps or obstacles that would otherwise require slow climbing or expose troops to fires in predictable approach corridors. These ideas track with the doctrine-minded analysis of Individual Lift Devices published by Army University Press, which frames ILDs as tools to thicken distributed maneuver, complicate an enemy’s targeting cycle, and probe inside anti-access bubbles at a small scale.
In U.S. and allied doctrine, such systems could support emerging concepts like Multi-Domain Operations and Distributed Maritime Operations, providing micro-scale air mobility that complements autonomous drones and unmanned surface craft. The combination of human agility and turbine propulsion could offer a new class of “aeroborne” soldier, operating between ground and air assets to bridge mobility gaps in fast-moving operations.
Early adopters are most likely special operations forces with maritime, counterterrorism, or hostage-rescue mandates. The United Kingdom’s at-sea trials suggest boarding and ship-to-shore insertions as the first credible use cases. Australia’s Land Power Forum has argued that jet-packs could move light forces directly from a ship or even a submarine to an initial foothold ashore, a concept that resonates in the Indo-Pacific, where littoral access, island chains, and contested ports dominate planning assumptions. If PPAMS yields even a handful of mature kits, U.S. units will have the resources and test-range ecosystem to iterate TTPs quickly.
The barriers are real and will shape procurement. Endurance remains measured in minutes, which is enough for a short dash but demands meticulous mission design, fuel staging, and extraction planning. Payload margins are tight once you add carbine, sidearm, body armor, comms, breaching tools, and the fuel backpack, which stresses human factors and training pipelines. ILDs are loud and hot, advertising their signature across acoustic and infrared bands and making low-visibility approaches hard against alert defenders with thermal imagers. There is no autorotation equivalent if a turbine quits at low altitude, so survivability relies on redundancy, envelope discipline, and emergency procedures. Their logistical footprint also remains uncertain; maintaining multiple micro-turbines, handling jet fuel, and training operators will require a dedicated sustainment framework that few units currently possess.
Acquisition officers will likely structure the path as spiral development: demonstration buys tied to specific missions, followed by limited objective experiments and doctrine notes rather than immediate programs of record. The dual-use path, with civilian training and entertainment revenue underwriting hardware iterations, reduces cost to the government but demands tighter export and safety oversight. If DARPA’s PPAMS advances and Gravity and Zapata translate trials into fieldable kits, 2026 to 2028 could see niche operational use, especially among maritime SOF and littoral units that prize speed and surprise over endurance. For land forces, the question is not whether ILDs replace helicopters but whether they unlock micro-maneuver options that are cheap enough, safe enough, and quiet enough to matter at the edge of the fight.
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The broader defense community is beginning to treat individual flight systems as more than experimental curiosities, examining how short-range personal air mobility could fit within emerging doctrines for distributed and agile operations. Progress in reliability and sustainment will determine whether these platforms evolve from demonstration tools to genuine mission enablers.
What began as an airshow demonstration is now edging into potential operational reality. Around the world, military planners are rethinking personal flight not as fantasy but as a tactical advantage that could redefine how troops move in complex terrain or across contested littorals. This is what French General Bruno Baratz said to an interviewer focused on innovation on October 26, 2025. The latter believes that solutions similar to the Flyboard Air from French start-up Zapata will soon be operational on the battlefield, as the need for speed and mobility increases, as demonstrated by the war in Ukraine. In April 2024, DARPA confirmed it is evaluating five prototype Portable Personal Air Mobility System kits for military use, signaling that the Pentagon’s appetite for individual lift devices is moving from curiosity to structured testing.
Follow Army Recognition on Google News at this link
A Royal Marine tests a Gravity Industries jet suit during a boarding exercise. Jet-powered individual lift devices, like these, are emerging as potential tools for special operations, offering rapid ship-to-shore and urban insertion capabilities despite current limitations in endurance and payload (Picture source: Gravity Industries).
As the United States pushes PPAMS forward, a small cohort of European startups is racing to shape the category. UK-based Gravity Industries says it has “tens of millions” in potential contracts on the table with two armed forces, a claim that underscores how rapidly the defense market for jet-powered suits is maturing from demos to funded trials. The company’s multi-turbine “jet suit” has appeared in Royal Navy boarding experiments and earlier reporting puts endurance at roughly five minutes for a 170-pound pilot on jet fuel or kerosene. Gravity’s founder argues that is already “enough time to make a surprise boarding on a ship,” a mission where seconds matter and ladders or fast-ropes introduce delay and exposure.
France’s Franky Zapata offers a different approach: a compact flyboard powered by five micro-jet turbines. The company describes Flyboard Air as “the smallest redundant manned aircraft ever built,” and public feats have shown both performance and risk management, from the Bastille Day parade flight to a successful English Channel crossing on 4 August 2019 after a failed first attempt ten days earlier. The platform’s stabilization and system redundancy pitch directly to military gatekeepers who worry about controllability during high-consequence insertions.
For commanders, the tactical promise of jet-suits and fly-boards sits in the last tactical mile. ILDs create a fast, vertical path where boats and helicopters telegraph presence or struggle with geometry. In maritime interdictions, an operator can lift off from a RIB and plant on a suspect vessel’s deck without a ladder or hoist, compressing the timeline from detection to seizure and reducing the window for adversaries to jettison contraband or mobilize small arms. In urban fights, ILDs offer rooftop-to-rooftop movement that bypasses choke points, roadblocks, and improvised explosive threats. In mountain terrain, they enable short, precise hops over gaps or obstacles that would otherwise require slow climbing or expose troops to fires in predictable approach corridors. These ideas track with the doctrine-minded analysis of Individual Lift Devices published by Army University Press, which frames ILDs as tools to thicken distributed maneuver, complicate an enemy’s targeting cycle, and probe inside anti-access bubbles at a small scale.
In U.S. and allied doctrine, such systems could support emerging concepts like Multi-Domain Operations and Distributed Maritime Operations, providing micro-scale air mobility that complements autonomous drones and unmanned surface craft. The combination of human agility and turbine propulsion could offer a new class of “aeroborne” soldier, operating between ground and air assets to bridge mobility gaps in fast-moving operations.
Early adopters are most likely special operations forces with maritime, counterterrorism, or hostage-rescue mandates. The United Kingdom’s at-sea trials suggest boarding and ship-to-shore insertions as the first credible use cases. Australia’s Land Power Forum has argued that jet-packs could move light forces directly from a ship or even a submarine to an initial foothold ashore, a concept that resonates in the Indo-Pacific, where littoral access, island chains, and contested ports dominate planning assumptions. If PPAMS yields even a handful of mature kits, U.S. units will have the resources and test-range ecosystem to iterate TTPs quickly.
The barriers are real and will shape procurement. Endurance remains measured in minutes, which is enough for a short dash but demands meticulous mission design, fuel staging, and extraction planning. Payload margins are tight once you add carbine, sidearm, body armor, comms, breaching tools, and the fuel backpack, which stresses human factors and training pipelines. ILDs are loud and hot, advertising their signature across acoustic and infrared bands and making low-visibility approaches hard against alert defenders with thermal imagers. There is no autorotation equivalent if a turbine quits at low altitude, so survivability relies on redundancy, envelope discipline, and emergency procedures. Their logistical footprint also remains uncertain; maintaining multiple micro-turbines, handling jet fuel, and training operators will require a dedicated sustainment framework that few units currently possess.
Acquisition officers will likely structure the path as spiral development: demonstration buys tied to specific missions, followed by limited objective experiments and doctrine notes rather than immediate programs of record. The dual-use path, with civilian training and entertainment revenue underwriting hardware iterations, reduces cost to the government but demands tighter export and safety oversight. If DARPA’s PPAMS advances and Gravity and Zapata translate trials into fieldable kits, 2026 to 2028 could see niche operational use, especially among maritime SOF and littoral units that prize speed and surprise over endurance. For land forces, the question is not whether ILDs replace helicopters but whether they unlock micro-maneuver options that are cheap enough, safe enough, and quiet enough to matter at the edge of the fight.
