Yes I did have that thought on seeing the video to form; aye but what when it's blowing a hooly and bucketing it down as it quite often is in mountainous terrain, and what about winter, would the jets experience icing. To suppose given most of the calls outs tend to be from folk of whom have injured themselves slipping on wet grass, it would be useful enough as a fair weather tool.
The US Army, more specifically the Marine Corps has been actively kicking the concept around since the 1950's. Hover platforms, single seat helicopters, jet packs, hover jeeps, NOTAR helicopters and the insane Project Ithacus all started with the dream of moving troops around faster. Testing of early prototypes quickly confirmed however what most engineers had said from the inception that the power to weight ratio sucked and flight times were going to be ridiculously short. The real kicker of course was that every soldier also needed to be a half decent pilot to fly the contraptions and Pentagon accountants soon had a fit. Remember fly-by-wire microcomputers that allow anybody to fly like a pro didn't come on the scene till the early eighties. (Quite what the USAF thought about the Army potentially having more pilots than them is also anybody's guess )
Sometime around 1966/7 an American General had with the idea to scale up an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile to the point it could hold 1200 troops & their equipment and land them almost anyplace on the planet in under an hour.
