Jetman vs Jaguar's 542bhp XJR

Superman is flying over Dubai. His cape billows in the warm, gentle breeze and below him the desert landscape stretches out as flat as the board it actually is…

Superman is plastic, about four inches tall and currently being manoeuvred around by Yves Rossy, who, in one particular way but perhaps not many others, is the full-scale, living embodiment of the Man of Steel. He is Jetman.

A name that, appropriately enough, harks back to the glory days of superheroes, the dream of flight, the right stuff, of iron-jawed, steely-eyed men looking off to the sunset before strapping in to touch the void, to go beyond, to explore new frontiers. And, well, with his carbon wing and quad jets, there’s never been anything quite like the Jetman before.

This feature was originally published in the March 2016 issue of Top Gear magazine.

But while he waves Superman around over the map, Jetman is actually discussing timings, logistics and flight plans. Ah, the reality of superherodom. But this is good – if Jetman has to worry about such trivialities, it might also mean today’s script might not run according to Hollywood law. I might actually be able to win our little race. Rules decided, arrangements made and we’re done: exit Superman, pursued by a helicopter.

Anyway, reality and back story: before he became Jetman (he appeared on TopGear TV in series 18, racing Richard Hammond in a Skoda Fabia S2000 rally car), Yves Rossy flew fighter planes for the Swiss Air Force (yes, they have one), and then commercial airliners. But what really sets him apart is that he’s utterly evangelical about flying, captivated by it: “You see angels in churches, you learn about Icarus, human flight is one of mankind’s oldest dreams. To be a bird is something so attractive, to have this third dimension is completely fascinating to me.”

Even acknowledging that, how does one get from Boeing to Buzz Lightyear? The touchpoints along Yves’ road are as follows: hang-gliding, skydiving, skysurfing, gliding wing and powered wing. “For me, skydiving was a flash in my brain, because free-falling, you know, it’s falling, but you are free. You go out of the airplane and you don’t see that you are falling down, so it’s like you are in a dream, flying around. But only for 45–50 seconds, and only in one direction. It’s DOWN.”

Most people would accept the limitations, but Yves is made of sterner stuff. The dream of compact winged flight became his passion. So with a basic grasp of aeronautics and a willingness to give his garage over to the cause, Yves started designing his own wing. His first attempt was a wing-profiled board that he stood on (“You know, like the Silver Surfer. But it was so unstable.”) But with that lesson behind him, he realised that safety was a vital component: “I was an airline captain – safety first. And I love my wife, I love life, so first, I designed a droppable harness so I could be separated from the wing if something went wrong.”

Ah yes, the wing. Much like a skydiver, Yves needs to drop from a helicopter or aeroplane (“To take off from the ground is still much too dangerous. I have the power, I could stand on the roof of a car at 200kph, turn on the jets and… wroooff”) and getting a wing into an aeroplane isn’t easy – especially as the greater the wingspan the better the stability. His first model was inflatable, and by all accounts, flew rather nicely, with a glide ratio of four (one down, four across), but when all’s said and done, it was only gliding – he was still heading down.

So Yves got in touch with JetCat, a firm that makes mini jet engines for model planes and target drones. Unsurprisingly, his approach was treated with a certain amount of scepticism initially, but after a few years of experiments and developments ended up with what you see here. “This is a fighter,” Yves tells me, “something that is powerful and very agile. The first time I flew with it, oh, it was crazy good. Completely unreal. When you take an angle of 60 degrees up through the cloud layer, almost naked with a little wing on your back, hey, you pinch yourself!”

We’re in Jetman’s hanger in Dubai. It’s vast and mostly empty. In the furthest corner there’s a sewing machine, old wings are lined up alongside crates, there’s a random patch of sofas, a headless spandex-clad mannequin, Superman’s flying table and, in the middle, trestles laden with jet wings. I ask to try one on.

Yves insists I do it properly, so first I get to waddle about in a parachute, then nestle back into the wing, crouching to strap it on. A few minutes of tightening and yanking pass. “OK, and now you stand up,” Yves says. I can’t stand up. It’s sodding heavy. Yves may be 56, but he must have legs like hydraulic pistons. “But it’s just like scuba,” he says, “it’s hard to move on the ground, but when you get in the air, it’s effortless.”

The wing weighs about 60kg fully laden with enough fuel to fly for 15–20 minutes. It has no movable flaps – all the steering is done by the soft, squidgy fuselage. Yves claims it’s just a matter of looking where you want to go but, battered by the wind, that can’t be easy. And there’s plenty of battering going on, as each P400-RXG engine delivers 40kg of thrust, yielding a power-to-weight ratio of 1:1. His only control is a thumbwheel throttle on his glove.

He does admit that, at close to terminal velocity, the forces pushing his head back into his body are “uncomfortable”. I’ve already deduced that Yves is hard as nails, so this is likely to be an understatement of significant proportions. I ask him what it was like flying alongside an Airbus A380 in 2015’s most unique viral video: “It was pure magic, at one point I flew directly over the vertical stabiliser, just five metres above it. There was no turbulence, it was calm, completely surreal – a view only I can ever have.”

So to see what Yves is capable of, we’re going to have a little race along an access road then onto the runway here at Skydive Dubai. There’s a good long kink at about the halfway mark that Yves insists will be just as challenging for him 700 metres up in the sky. He also has to deal with the crosswind, although in his case it’s not blowing traction-limiting sand onto his racing line. I have a brand-new Jaguar XJR to hand, supercharged V8, 542bhp, 0–62mph in 4.6 seconds, 174mph all out.

“What’s your top speed?” I ask Yves.

“About 180,” comes the reply.

“This should be close, then. Mine does 174mph.”

“Ah, but mine is in knots.”

180 knots is 207mph. I don’t think his acceleration will be exactly slow, either. Not least because he starts by falling out of a helicopter directly above me. The moment he does that, I get the call to set off. The XJR gives it the full rear-wheel-drive detonation away from the line, a rooster tail of smoke, dust and sand spiralling into the air behind me. It’s a genuinely fast limo, this new XJR, ratcheting up three figures in short order as the kink closes in. The track is pretty Mickey Mouse, though, run-off at the kink consists of a sand dune, and just after it I need to slot between a couple of cones which mark the surface-change ramp onto the runway. Imagine hitting a speed bump at 135-odd mph. 

The Jag’s suspension soaks it up, and once on the runway I chance a glance up through the panoramic roof. Can’t see a bleeding thing up there, but I sense he’s just playing with me, rolling his throttle dial forwards and back a bit, making it close.

I flash through the finish at 173mph. I stop, get out, look up and spot a tiny black speck victory-rolling off over the desert. Safe to say, I’ve lost. But the race was merely a bit of eye candy, Meeting Yves – that’s the real treat. He’s a proper dude, passionate, energetic, full of plans for the future of individual flight. It’ll probably never happen, but around Yves you believe it could, that we will all one day strap on a wing in our back gardens and fly off to work.

What’s the dream? “Iron Man. With or without wings. Something where you are completely autonomous.” Not Superman, then? “No! Superman isn’t real. Iron Man, I think that is achievable.”