Into a clear sky Yves Rossy, a Swiss airline pilot and adventurer, dropped out of a small plane high above the Alps last week, unfolded the tips of his 8ft carbon-fibre wing and fired up its four tiny jet engines.

He looked like a real-life Buzz Lightyear. Within seconds he was soaring and diving at speeds of up to 180mph.

“I raised my chest to get out of the dive and I gave the engines more fuel,” he said afterwards. “And I flew up like hell on fire.”

Using his body to control his movement, he was as close to being a “birdman” as anybody has ever come. “I’d look right and turn my shoulders and off I went to the right.”

He turned and soared again and again. Having performed figures of eight and an impeccable 360-degree roll “to impress the girls”, Rossy landed by parachute near Lake Geneva having completed his first public flight with his self-made flying contraption.

The balding 48-year-old has always been an adventurer. He once parachuted from a plane and “sky-surfed” on to the top of the giant jet fountain set in Lake Geneva. Having skimmed the top of the fountain, he descended to the lake where he managed to grab somebody’s water ski equipment and continued skiing himself.

A few years ago, he became the first person to cling on to one plane while holding on to another, in mid-flight. He “flew” between the two for several seconds before parachuting into the void below.

But his greatest triumph was last week’s flight with his jet wing. It was the first time anybody could claim to have cracked the science-fiction fantasy of being a “birdman”.

People have dreamt of flying since written history began. In Greek myth, Icarus flew too close to the sun and fell into the sea as his waxen wings melted. In Ming-dynasty China, inquisitive emperors compelled subjects to jump from great heights with unpromising bundles of wood and leather attached to their backs. And in the early Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci drew detailed plans for assorted gliders, wings, ornithopters and gyrocopters.

You might have thought the invention of mechanised flight would have put an end to such ideas. Far from it.

In the early 20th century, a “birdman” inventor called Clem Sohn put it like this: “Someday I think that everyone will have wings and be able to soar from the house-tops. But there must be a lot more experimenting before that can happen.”

Sohn plummeted to his death at a Paris air show in 1937. But that hasn’t stopped people trying. Does Rossy’s feat mean the day of the birdman is finally drawing near? FOR many enthusiasts, the ultimate flight fantasy is the jet pack, a piece of kit intended to enable you to climb vertically from standstill, hover, fly forwards, backwards and turn, with little more than an oversized rucksack on your back.

In the second world war, Germany experimented with jets attached to pilots. The Himmelstürmer (Skystormer) was meant to help engineer units to cross minefields and fly over bridgeless waters. The American military also became briefly interested in jet packs in the late 1950s and 1960s.

A workable system was developed and James Bond used one in the 1965 film Thunderball to escape his enemy. (The real, shrill roar of the rocket was replaced on the soundtrack with the hiss of a fire extinguisher, “to seem more realistic”, according to the film’s makers.)

The same jet pack, flown by the same stuntman, was used to dramatic effect at the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Michael Jackson also used a stunt double to fly a rocket jet at the end of concerts on his Dangerous tour of 1992-93.

A Mexican company, TAM, sells a custom-built jet pack, but it doesn’t come cheap. For about £75,000 you get the pack, a series of training flights and a machine to make your own supply of rocket fuel, which is based on hydrogen peroxide. That substance is relatively stable but, put in contact with a catalyst such as silver, it decomposes into superheated steam and oxygen in less than 0.1 of a millisecond.

This is how the jet pack gets its thrust. The snag? It burns up so fast, the TAM pack can only fly for about 30 seconds and is rather tricky to control. Nobody has yet solved the problem of how to keep weight low while increasing fuel capacity.

But enthusiasts haven’t given up. In Britain an inventor called Richard Brown has spent years developing his own system, refining power-to-weight ratios and such things as “minimal gyroscopic energy” and “minimum torque reaction”.

He was hoping to report this month on flight trials using a “multi-axis rig”, but problems with the electronics have apparently stalled progress. The only place rocket packs have been truly successful is space, where the lack of gravity means much less thrust is required.

Birdmen and women who want to fly now have had to settle for more prosaic propulsion – a propeller strapped to their backs.

Paramotoring, as it is known, essentially combines the sort of wing-shaped parachute used in paragliding with a small engine and propeller. Chris Clarke, an IT worker in Hampshire, has been flying a para-motor for five years, taking off from a field near his home.

Not long ago, with three others, he flew from outside Basingstoke to a secluded country pub, landed, had a couple of pints and then flew back.

Clarke reckons the cost of getting about is roughly comparable with driving a petrol-powered car. The trouble is that paramotoring is ill-suited to commuting because of restrictions on take-off – you must be at least 500ft from people and buildings – and the impossibility of flying in strong winds.

“The fun is just in being in the air,” said Clarke, who believes it can never be more than a leisure activity. Which is not to say that it’s entirely serene. Another keen paramotorist recently experienced a close call.

“I started to get a warm feeling in my back,” said Patrick Vandenbulcke. “I didn’t pay much attention because I thought I was just sweating. But a minute later, I started to feel intense burning. The pain was unbearable and I had to get to the ground fast.

“I cut my engine and went down. I quickly got out of the harness and saw that there was a huge hole melted straight through all the cloth and back protection.”

The equipment, which fits into the back of any car, costs a few thousand pounds. A full training course, as advertised on Paramotorsuk.co.uk, could cost £1,000.

If you’re lucky, you may pick up cheaper equipment secondhand. There’s one preused kit advertised on the site now, with a bit of damage to the cage and tips of the propellers due to a rough landing. “Scared myself to death,” the seller reports, “hence the reason for this sale.”

Fun though it is, paramotoring is not in the same league as the acrobatics demonstrated by Rossy last week. A FORMER air force pilot, Rossy became passionate about flying as a “birdman” when he got his first taste of freefalling at the age of 29. He would drop from 4,000 metres to 1,000 metres before opening his parachute.

“Freefall was the closest I could come to my dream of flying without any machinery around me,” he said last week. “You’re practically naked with just a parachute and when you’re dropping you really think you’re flying, you’re floating. You don’t see the planet getting closer.”

After leaving the air force, he became a pilot for Swissair. It never quite provided the thrills he sought – perhaps just as well for his passengers. “The cockpit of the Airbus is the most beautiful office in the world,” he said, “but I don’t have any contact with the air around me. All comfort and no contact, a bit like being in a box or a submarine under water.”

So he began developing his jet-powered wing. It hasn’t all gone smoothly; in attempting to fly an earlier version in 2005, he lost control and spiralled to just 500 metres from the ground before managing to open his parachute.

His passion for flying has also taken its toll on his private life. “I’m single, it’s not easy. A passion like this takes up a lot of my time and my life,” he said. “A woman doesn’t like to be No 2.”

His next target is to use the jet wing to fly across the English Channel, probably in the autumn. “My flight will bea tribute to all those who came before me, many of whom were killed,” he said.

If he makes it, wannabe fliers will want to know whether they too will some day be able to soar. The answer is yes, possibly, but it is unlikely to be more than an expensive hobby. Rossy and his sponsors have spent more than £100,000 to get him this far. Even a mass-produced model, he reckons, would cost about £40,000.

And the problem of power-to-weight efficiency remains. Although his jet wing flies, it cannot take off from the ground because it would require too much fuel.

“I don’t think it will becomea means of transport because it’s too complicated and it requires too much energy,” said Rossy.

“If you wanted to commute to work you’d still need a plane to get airborne, because you’d need masses of power to take off on your own.

“I could take off from the roof of a moving car, but it’s not a very good proposition as far as risk-management goes. It would take me three minutes to get to a height of 800 metres, which is my minimum safe height, and if there’s any problem during those three minutes, I’m dead. So I won’t try it.”

Instead, he sees his prototype as better suited to a new kind of airborne sport. “Imagine if people got together to fly around as if they were the Red Arrows,” he said. “I can see a future in that.”

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