Are These Engines The Future Of Extreme Sports?

In the world of professional snowboarding bigger, better and faster are always the objectives. Breaking records is the goal and no one knows that better than Jamie Barrow. This British snowboarder recently broke the record for fastest snowboarder in his country. He managed to break that record at 94.2 mph with a back injury still in the process of healing. His taste for speed and the broken records on his resume made him a perfect candidate to test out the electric jet engines made by Dreamscience.

Barrow and the crew found a frozen lake in St. Mortiz, Switzerland that was ideal for the experiment. The simple question was how fast Barrow could go with the jet engines. After two days of practice with the engines, Barrow was able to hit a top speed of 80.6 km, which is 50 mph. This is particularly remarkable because the engines powered him from a dead stop on flat ground and the engines are electric, powered by a battery.

"We reached a top speed of 80.6 kilometers per hour with electric jet engines, it's really impressive. So Adam at Dreamscience really did a good job," Barrow said. "There [are] a lot of improvements we could make, we could get it lighter, we'll be able to get more power, the battery packs will get smaller."

With those improvements, it's not a stretch to imagine these engines coming to mainstream sports, or as they predict, the engines could create entirely new sports. The developer, known only as Adam, sees a bright future for his devices.

I see devices like this becoming extreme sport devices that are really commonplace. People will use them to get up ski slopes, they'll use them to go wind surfing when there's no wind. You know, wherever you want a lot of power, you'd probably use something like this in the future.