Air Forced: jet-engined pocket bike with twin afterburners

Yeah, you read right. This ranks up there with some of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. Air Forced (named as a tribute to US troops in the persian gulf) is a backyard custom that started with an eBay-sourced road-legal pocketbike frame and a home-made jet turbine that started out as a truck turbocharger.

Russ Moore, the (mad? evil?) genius behind the project figured a pocketbike would be a funnier platform for a jetbike than an ordinary roadbike - “I figured as long as I was doing something ridiculous to begin with, why not make it more so. The thought hit me to put the engine into a small motorcycle. Imagine the looks on the faces of drivers around you when you passed them on a jet powered motorcycle, and it was very small. Yes the roar of a jet engine from a pocket bike would definitely be a funny experience.”

To date, this might just be the only jetbike on the planet other than the bumper-melting 400kmh US$200,000 Y2K superbike, as owned by Jay Leno. Jay’s, of course, doesn’t have the ludicrous twin afterburners!

Moore’s website has a painstaking 32-page step-by-step description of exactly how he built the bike, as well as the jet turbine itself, right down to the CAD designs and machining of parts. Skip to page 31 for testing videos showing the bike being revved to a lazy 45,000RPM, as well as some amazing night-time afterburner test videos.

Take a bow, Russ Moore, you’re a psychopath!