Emirates Jetmen flying stunt
On a wing and prayer. Two men in jet packs fly ridiculously close to an Emirates A380. YouTube/XDubai

Two fearless men strapped to jetpacks have flown within touching distance with the world's largest passenger aircraft in a breath-taking video. Emirates Airlines and Jetmen teamed up to pull off the high-flying stunt above the skies in Dubai and the result is not for the faint of heart.

As part of a publicity stunt the airline decided to showcase carefully choreographed aerial acrobatics where Jetmen pilots Yves Rossy and Vince Reffet, strapped to their jet packs, soared around the giant aircraft at 4,000ft and at one point came were almost wing-to-wing with the A380.

"This task will be quite different from what we normally do," Captain Abbas Shaban, Emirates' chief pilot for technical operations, said in a making-of video for the event.

The stunt was meticulously co-ordinated over three months with a large team planning out the sequence to the millimetre using a storyboard. Designated airspace was used and the stunt took place at 6:30am, when air traffic was at a minimum.

Rossy described the experience as being like "mosquitoes flying with an eagle or condor".

Watching the video, you get a sense of the enormous size of the A380 as the Jetmen, flying at a speed of up to 170 knots, look like mere specs beside it.

The point of the stunt was to showcase "unguarded ambition and the vision to push boundaries beyond the unthinkable". We think they achieved that.

For us, though, the most impressive aspect about the video was how effective the jet packs were, which leaves us wondering how soon can we will be able our hands on one.