Flyboards use water pressure to hoist riders aloft in a controlled way.

Image: Natashabelarus, CC BY-SA 4.0

Beyond recreation, what else could this principle be useful for? Reasoning that fire hoses already have tremendous amounts of water pressure on tap, researchers at Japan's Akita Prefectural University have developed a flying, controllable hose for extinguishing fires.

"The 'Dragon* Firefighter' [is] a flying hose that could help put out fires that are too dangerous for humans to approach. The robot achieves liftoff through the pressure of eight controllable jets of water, and it has a thermal camera attached to its head, to help its pilot find the location of the fire."

Flying at two meters above the ground, "the firehose can change shape and be oriented towards flames, steered by a control unit in a wheeled cart behind," the researchers explain. "The cart is connected through a supply tube to a fire truck with a water reservoir of 14,000 liters."

The researchers have built a four-meter-long prototype that they can successfully snake through a window, at least in testing. The design is open-source, and they've published it here.

*Note: In East Asian cultures, dragons don't have winged-dinosaur form factors like Smaug; instead they're depicted as giant flying snakes with minimal limbs.

Bros before hose