Flying like Iron Man: Up Close with Richard Browning's Gravity Jet Suit!

I'm at a private airport in Los Angeles, California, with Travis. I first heard about the seriousness of this undertaking in 2017, when YouTube kindly offered me a TED Talk on How I Built a Jet Suit by a gentleman named Richard Browning. I followed Richard and his company.

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ly for the past two and a half years and I was invited to try his invention for myself. I'm going to tell you all about the jet

suit

, how it works, how to actually fly and what Browning's plans are for the future of the company. As you can imagine, he was incredibly excited.

He had been thinking about this exact moment for over two years. I can't believe this is happening. Oh my god, my brain isn't processing what's really happening. Sometimes dreams really do come true. This is crazy. I can't just put on the jet early and expect to be able to fly like Browning and his team. This takes time. Words like epic madness come to mind when I think about what it feels like to have that

suit

on. I couldn't process it at the time. I'll do my best to describe what it was like on that platform. First, they strap you into a harness that attaches to the leash so you don't accidentally fly off or crash.

You then put the suit on by sliding your arms into the arm supports and strap the rear motor to your torso. The suit is pretty heavy, but hey, this thing literally makes you fly. I felt more badass at this exact moment than I ever had before making this first attempt. I thought the trigger worked like a car or motorcycle accelerator, meaning the harder you push or turn, the more power you get, but that's not the case, it's more like a cordless drill that has adjustable power levels, It's basically off or on. maximum power, but that maximum power level can be fine-tuned.

Gravity starts most customers at what is effectively 20 stops below maximum power to get used to the turbine spinning and distributing force. As soon as I pulled the trigger, I felt incredible strength from everyone. three of those points, the motors in my arms and the one in my back, the force makes you lean a little, similar to standing in front of a desk or countertop and leaning on it with your arms, the correct way to float is to bring The Jets

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r They go up to maximum power and then move your arms down, thus lifting your body off the ground while you rely on the force exerted by the motors, but since this was my first attempt, I didn't really know what I was doing.

I just jumped in and felt the power and what you see the pilots doing here are signals to increase the power of the suit one push at a time. I had a quick chat with Richard after my first test flight and he gave me some tips. I'll be honest, I wasn't happy with the first round because I hadn't really achieved a proper hover round. My focus here was to position my arms correctly to achieve a hover and this here, about six seconds of hover marked. It was a pivotal moment for me, feeling the tremendous power of the five jet engines suspending me in the air even if it was just for a few seconds, gave me an overwhelming feeling of joy.

I was really excited, it also made me really want to keep trying, but alas, a bondage session only lasts two minutes because the Jets burn about a gallon of fuel every minute, so as it stands, even the Untethered flights last only about two minutes, but that doesn't stop Richard and his team from continuing to push the limits of what's possible for the jet. suit, this is what a jet suit is and how to operate it: we have five gas turbines, two small jet engines on each arm and then you have a big one on the back that burns fuel which then expands into a gas that converts the turbine and that's basically just throwing a charge of hot gas that way so that you're propelled in the other direction by wearing the suit and all together those three are like a tripod like a camera tripod and if you widen them, that means that all the force is coming out, you're not going to go anyway as you lower them, point them down, you're going to start going up.

You have a control system that is a trigger on the right arm. and a push switch on the left arm out so you can control the maximum power of the suit and the trigger is just so you can take the power up to the maximum power for your body weight while training the best What we want to see you do is maintain those engines at full power that way and you'll be struggling a little bit with thrust, but you should be able to stand there and stay still, exactly like what you're doing. vector down and at that point you're pushing the gas down, so you're going up.

The nice thing about this is relying on the engines throttle control to adjust your height because you are running at a constant power. By launching that push using your body, the push increases your body, that's why we have the least amount of equipment possible, like riding a bike, you become one with it, because while riding a bike you don't really think about riding a bike. It's the same thing with this, but in many more dimensions, so it's much more dynamic to fly by just moving your arms than controlling the throttle. This is the main control board.

This is what turns manual controls into a signal that engines can use. they read and then they know what kind of level to go to, but each engine has an engine control unit behind it, there's one behind it, another behind it and then the one on the back of the Internet is also up there and you have these micro GSU ports that are for this one, which is our type of ground support unit, this is how I can connect to any of their engines and reel it in. The whole suit is 3D printed, this one 3D printed in aluminum, which you I can see those are the shiny sections and nylon and then we have some 3D printed steel on the back.

This is 3D printed steel coated in black and is actually the ballistic shield for that rear engine. Same thing with these aluminum sections here. You can see around the On the turbine blade, we actually have aluminum, then a layer of Kevlar here and then another layer of aluminum on top, so there's a starter motor for each turbine, that kind of kicks the It starts and then injects some fuel and then there is a glow. It is plugged in and then it starts a kind of combustion process and from then on it perpetuates itself. Now let's talk about Richard Browning, who is he and what is his background and why he built a

flying

machine.

He just woke up? day and you decide to do this, take me back to some of what you were doing before this was a part of your life and there was a day when you woke up and said today is the day I'm going to go buy a jet turbine and I put this thing on my arm, what was your life like then and what was that moment when you made the decision to buy one of these? Yeah, yeah, good question, so actually most of my normal sort of career, if you will, was as an oil trader.

I used to work in the city of London. He used to buy and sell cargoes and move ships around the world. I used to do some interesting business development traveling, but nothing, you know, that exotic, it was quite interesting challenging work. I spent about six years in the British Royal Marines Reserve, in addition to my day job and all my work. Here I am giving you the ingredients of the reason why my whole family history was from the world of aeronautics and engineering, so a grandfather examines all the black people who used to run the UK's leading helicopter business, my other Grandfather was a wartime pilot and also a civilian pilot, and my late father was an aeronautical engineer, maverick, designer and inventor, so I think a lot of that has always been there.

I have always loved doing. and building and breaking things you know as a kid that never went away. He probably ultimately pursued work in the oil industry because it was interesting and challenging. I love the part of doing business and meeting interesting people around the world. world, but you know it paid very well, that kind of freed me up over the years to gradually have the freedom of my own I guess, you also know the financial freedom with my family to start doing more and more interesting things and I mean interesting in the sense. when you see a challenge and think: I wonder if I could do something like put your Green Beret on the wrong Marines.

You think it would be great if I could do it. I'm not sure I can do it, but I can. It's going to be great and I did enough things in the first part of my life that I got used to the fact that probably four times out of five, when I have one of those ideas, it doesn't work and you have to do it. live with a failure and then every once in a while the one success among those five makes all the failures worth it, it's very much that kind of innovative spirit, it's a tough journey but hopefully the ups and downs will outweigh to the frequent lows, if you wish. inspiration together I had this idea that you know flight human flight and speed and all that kind of stuff you know I love all that what if you could support your own body weight like you know we're sitting on this stage here now on that stage? is exerting enough force on our butts to keep us suspended on the stage, so if you change the stage for the momentary support of some form of propulsion and that propulsion instead of going up your butt because I'm sitting in a seat instead What if some of that was really in your arms?

Because you can move them very well. We are very good at being aware of where our arms and hands are. What if you really had the propulsion? in your hands if I can lean forward and you know all these gymnastic things that I used to do if you can lean forward you know in a plank position and do it right. Surely I can lean on those engines so that all of that is What inspired me to do it. Well, let's try this. I knew enough about jet engines and gas turbines to be confident in the very early stages of the aircraft engine and in that first test, you know, you've seen the TED talk.

Yeah, in the footage, Danny ran down a lane with some kind of aluminum tube screwed on, which was probably one of the biggest leaps of knowledge on the entire trip because any sensible engineer would look at it on paper and say it's going to consume a ridiculous amount. . amount of fuel will get very hot, it will be tremendously dangerous, it will wave around like a fire hose does, obviously because fire hoses do that, right? And with that axle spinning at almost 120,000 rpm, it's going to have gyroscopic momentum like when you spin a bicycle wheel and hold the axle, you'll never be able to spit out, so you're going to need pairs of them that spin counterclockwise and, oh my god, all this stuff. it doesn't make sense, I won't try it, on the other hand, no You never realize that almost all of those assumptions are absolute garbage, so that was probably the biggest step and then you saw all the subsequent steps in the span of just three years.

Richard went from super primitive prototypes to multiple fully functional jet suits. and

gravity

is doing more than just building these jet suits. Richard hired two test pilots, Alex Wilson and Sam Rogers, who helped Richard work on and design new suits. Gravity has built a successful business and made a name for itself by doing something truly unique and extraordinary. In 2017, Richard set the Guinness World Record for fastest speed and body-controlled jet-powered suit. He hit 32 miles per hour and then last month, in November 2019, he broke his own record and hit 85 miles per hour, logically speaking here. The risk of injury increases dramatically as you climb higher and go faster as we push the limits here, we take an attitude that every risk we take has to be recoverable, so jumping over a truck here or whatever is as high as I want to go because If you forget an engine failure, then it's going to hurt quite a bit, but I'll be fine, so I'm falling off a motorcycle, right, it's not going to be a great day.

I'm going to fly over this hangar. I could do it, but I do have a glitch. I won't be able to try again, I won't be able to continue with this journey. I think it's safe to say that Richard's journey is extremely unique and has been able to continue because of how

gravity

operates as a business the exploratory approach that has led us to build these things we apply to the business side as well because there is no rule book on how to make a business out of these things, I mean, there are obvious things like, for example, doing air shows in the client. experiences, what ended up happening is that after we had done some very high level events, we did something at ICON, ik, mark zuckerberg, you know, private office events and stuff like that, we've done some ridiculous things, we opened baseball games in Japan, we did car launches in China every time we do one, it tends to appear in the national media in that country, everyone is like, oh my gosh, it's real, it's not just something on the internet that's fake, we get a additional credibility boostand then another wave of people comes and goes.

You come to our company, you know we have a Cisco annual meeting and this will be real in a month. I think you know, can you come and do a keynote on the journey of innovation and can you attend a flight demonstration, etc.? This is the 95th event in 30 different countries where all of us, one of my pilots, have done a little bit in two years, yes, two and a half years, and that's exactly what the gravity team was doing in California, the company is based in England and wine. to this private airport to train clients from all walks of life, so what's next for the future of jet suits and gravity as a company?

There is a point and I want to say that everything you are doing now seems to you. You're just following your instinctive learning as you're doing well, then this will become something like: Can I get one in ten years and fly to work in New York instead of riding an electric skateboard? So you know, the honest answer is who knows the reality we are in. We've done all these events around the world, we've built a huge audience, we've really refined the technology so it's not messed up, we trained a lot of people. I mean, you've seen, some people here are pretty ready to let loose.

At the end of a day it's ridiculous how fast you learn. I think you know at the end of the day what the point of this is. What is the net impact we are having? Well, people lose their minds in a childish way. Human beings fly around, so when you watch something like Formula One, IndyCar or NASCAR you see vehicles that aren't, they're not very practical at all, they don't do much for you, but they entertain you enormously, inspire you and push the technology, so our plan right now is to build a racing series, we filmed one already, there are four, five, six of us drivers, everyone is starting on a kind of traffic light system, you know, the racing lights of resistance turn green for everyone.

The hammers start immediately at 40 or 50 miles per hour over relatively low water, so it is safe to go around the pylons. If you think about the Red Bull Air Race type format, we'll run them, the plan is around the world in interesting places and over water, so you should have one in Bermuda and in March and it's the obvious direction of graduation, so you know you were getting along great there so with a few more tries you would be there on some grass about three feet above the grass where you have no restraints. but you know that at any time, if you're wobbly, you just turn it on, you're down immediately, write a few more, a few passes over the grass, you're ready to go over the water and then you can really do whatever you want to a certain extent.

You don't want to go above twenty thirty feet yet, but you are completely free and can join us. You know, we're going to compete in Bermuda. This progression in building these suits now your attention and focus is developing the racing series, yes. We are doing all types because as soon as I say mine is faster than yours, you are going to put in a lot of effort and try to find ways to go faster than mine. The human spirit is all about competition. Yes, think about all the evolution that has arisen. of IndyCar and Formula One and I think it's a wonderful way to increase the impact we have on audiences, but also to accelerate the technology.

Now, in parallel, we continue to do events, we continue to say that we train customers, but we will also move quickly towards Coming back to your point, maybe some technology that is actually more mainstream and sensible. We built an electric version of this, for example, and it works. The challenge is that the weight of the batteries means the flight time is a bit crazy, it's like seconds if battery technology improves. So maybe you could have something that goes and takes you, you know, similar to that, everyone doesn't need to be able to hear what it is, it doesn't need to take you very high, you could just drift, you know?

At six feet above the ground, you can have a human surround airbag system if there was a problem and the radar-type parking sensor technology ensures it doesn't go too high or too low, which could well be your scooter's replacement. modern. how we get there, we get there by feeling the journey from something like a corridor, so that's where Gravity Industries is currently located. They have successfully built multiple fully functional jetpacks or jetsuits, as they are technically called. Richard Browning is a modern Tony Stark is basically a superhero at this point. It's been incredible to see the company's progression since I first saw the TED talk two and a half years ago and to be there again in person seeing this in action is epic, I think looking ahead to 2020 and Beyond will see Gravity continue to refine the suit from a design and functionality perspective that can increase flight time, dazzle new audiences in more countries and launch the racing series.

Browning is one of the most ambitious people I've ever sat down with and his drive is truly inspiring, so no matter what you're looking to do in your life, just know that anything is possible, even human flight, for Richard and all. the gravity team, thank you for having me and thank you for doing everything you do. I have changed my life and the lives of many others and I can't wait to fly again.