Dubai is buying jetpacks for fire-fighting emergencies

For a city like Dubai, with lots of high-rise buildings, the conventional approach to tackling fire-fighting emergencies is apparently problematic.

That’s seems to be the thinking behind why the state is creating a new page in their strategic playbook. The city’s Civil Defense department recently signed an agreement with New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft for 20 manned and unmanned jetpacks to be delivered sometime in the near future, said in a press release.

The jetpack will provide organizations like Dubai Civil Defense “a significant operation advantage,” said Peter Coker, CEO and Managing Director of Martin Aircraft.

The latest version of their jetpacks can fly as high as 3,000 feet at a top speed of about 74 km/h, for 30 minutes at a time, according to BBC.

The company says the jetpacks are also equipped with technology that can be deployed in emergency situations, such as transporting medical supplies and even rescuing people from burning buildings, Gizmag reports.

“Sometimes, in fires, people go to the top of the building. You cannot always get ladders there, and you cannot always use the elevators,” Dubai’s civil defense department director Ali Hassan Almutawa told the BBC.

“The [jetpacks] can go into confined spaces to size-up the situation. We are going to modify them with thermal-imaging cameras,” he said.

The price tag for one of these jetpacks is reportedly $250,000.