After winning the battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington observed that it was the “nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life”. Last week Eric Scott, the American daredevil who flew across a 1,500ft-wide canyon wearing nothing but a homemade jet pack, trumped the duke.

Without a parachute or safety net, he made it with only nine seconds to spare before his contraption ran out of the fuel that powered it – hair bleach, or hydrogen peroxide. The achievement catapulted the 45-year-old into the record books and was hailed as a big step towards a commercially viable jet pack. However, listening to Scott’s version of events, you are left in no doubt that it could all have gone horribly wrong.

The problem with jet packs is that they burn fuel very fast. In the case of Scott, he reckoned the fuel would run out after 30 seconds, at the most. And once that happened there was only one way he could go. Then there was the fact that rather than being just a few feet off the ground, as had been the case on previous tests, he was hovering above a 1,000ft gorge with nothing to break his fall until he hit the river below. “[A parachute] would have added more weight so I opted to go light to get across,” he says. “If I had carried a parachute, it could have been very possible I would have had to use it. And if you see the bottom of that gorge, it’s barely 200ft wide and the Arkansas River’s covering half of it . . . It didn’t make sense.”

And if he lost power 1,000ft above the canyon floor? “My abort plan was to hook it [the jet pack] over the bridge or make some type of crash-landing on a ledge rather than do the 1,000ft bounce,” he says. “That’s all I had. There’s a ledge about 300ft below but plans B,C, D – all the way through the alphabet – weren’t favourable at all. But you’ve got to have some kind of plan.”

The main worry, however, was that Scott had no way of of knowing whether his jet pack would have enough fuel to make the crossing: “This was almost twice the distance that I’ve ever flown before,” he says. “I’ve run out of fuel at 29 seconds before – 2ft off the deck. But I had no idea exactly how long it [the crossing] was going to take. I was expecting a 25 to 28-second flight.

“It always looks good on paper, but paper’s paper and 1,000ft gorges are 1,000ft gorges. Finally, I just made the decision that we’re gonna do it. It was a personal thing. Just one of those things that needed to be done.”

Jet packs have been the dream of garden-shed enthusiasts and multinational aeronautical companies for decades. The idea of giving a human being enough thrust to lift clear of the surface, and the control to follow his chosen flight path, was regarded as the closest you could get to mimicking the flight of a bird.

The idea was cemented in many people’s minds when Sean Connery wore just such a contraption in the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball. The system used was real: it had been developed for the US military by Bell Aerosystems. However, despite their allure, rocket belts – to use the correct technical term – have remained tantalisingly out of reach.

One of the problems engineers have encountered is that as well as burning fuel at a rate of knots (and of course there is a limit to how much fuel you can carry on your back) jet packs are inherently unstable.

The contours of the human body are not designed for flight, and the higher the velocity, the greater the aerodynamic instability. Flying a jet pack at all requires great skill and coordination – and a heat-resistant suit. Bell Aerosystems’ top test pilot, Bill Suitor, described the task as like “standing on a beach ball bobbing in the middle of a swimming pool”.

Today Scott is one of a select handful of jet-pack pilots in the world, a self-described “barnstormer” with more than 800 flights and 16 years of professional display flying to his name. His jet pack is a modern evolution of the Bell design– a faster, lighter, hot-rod version that burns about a gallon of hydrogen peroxide rocket fuel every six seconds. It produces a cloud of eyewatering superheated steam, an ear-shredding 150-decibel roar and as much power as a Formula One car.

Unlike Yves Rossy, the Swiss airline pilot who crossed the Channel using rocket-powered wings in September, Scott had nothing to help change direction other than thrust. “You’re using your left hand as your control, just rotating you left and right, and if you overcorrect, the wind wants to spin you,” he explains. “I slowed it down and coasted, and then I just kept punching it and punching it, trying to maintain control with as much speed as I possibly could.

“Then when I reached the rim of the canyon, the winds were coming up the wall, which kinda blew me off to the left a little bit. That got me a little nervous because I was still hauling ass and I was just trying to get over the rim of the canyon. I spun a little bit and went in sideways, rotated around and ended up coming in backwards.”

It took Scott, who hit a top speed of 70mph, 21 intense seconds to reach the concrete landing strip on the south side of the gorge. “There is no greater feeling than that right there,” he says: “getting down onto solid ground!”

His feet are unlikely to remain on the ground for long. Several new record attempts are already in the pipeline, including a promised “high-rise to high-rise” flight in the UK. And he’s busy developing a commercially available turbine-powered jet pack for his company, the Colorado-based Jet Pack International. Due on sale in 2009, the T-73 jet pack will cost around £130,000 and give a flight time somewhere between five and 10 minutes.

“You could have a cool recreational vehicle that you could go out and kick around the mountains, fly through canyons,” he says. “[And when] you get two guys in jet packs, you’ve got a sport.”

Right. You first, Eric.