Commercial airline pilot takes flying to new heights.

HORSHAM, WEST SUSSEX, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM (OCTOBER 18, 2008) HOT
UNDER THE COLLAR PRODUCTIONS -

Over the past four years, Stuart Ross has been working hard to fly.
He has already become the first European to lift off during a tethered flight
-- but he's set a higher goal for himself, and hopes to be fully airborne by
the end of the year.
Ross 'flies' using his own Rocketbelt, one of only a few that have ever
been made. The Rocketbelt was first developed in the early 1960s by Wendall
Moore when he was Chief engineer at Bell Aerosystems. It's a complex machine
that runs on Hydrogen peroxide -- and many others have abandoned similar
projects due to technical difficulties. This hasn't stopped Ross, who has
spent monies in the region of 80,000 British pounds (approx. 133,000 U.S.
dollars) working on his Rocketbelt. The commercial airline pilot is determined
to make this project work.
"It's a lot more than flying an aeroplane of course it is, it's
real seat of your pants flying, this is. The aeroplanes I fly at work they're
all, you know 99.9 percent computerized, they know where they're going, they
land automatically and they're pretty easy to operate. The Rocketbelt --
that's completely separate, now that's an entity all in itself. It's a great
machine, once I get the hang of it, its gonna be superb," he said.
Most people will remember the Rocketbelt from the opening ceremony of
the 1984 Olympics. It also made an appearance in "Thunderball" with
Sean Connery, and has recently been voted the most popular James Bond gadget.

When Ross started out he had no idea it would take so long to achieve
his goal.
"If somebody was to say to you, 'Stuart that'll take you, five
years to get that right', I wouldn't have believed them, there's no way I'd
have believed them. I would have thought looking at the Rocketbelt in a museum
or seeing a photograph of one you think, well it looks pretty straight forward
it can't take much more than six, seven months to put together, but five years
I reckon is what it would take and that's with experts helping you," Ross
said.
Ross will have to learn to control the Rocketbelt completely before he
can move from tethered to free flights. Once successful, Ross plans to fly the
Rocketbelt at high profile events around the world.