How Gravity Built the World's Fastest Jet Suit | WIRED

I would be the first to admit that we initially took this path for the sheer joy of taking on a challenge that was largely thought to be impossible. There was no textbook on how to do it. I'm Richard Browning. I am the founder and chief pilot of

gravity

tests and for the last few years we have been building flying

suit

s with jet engines of thousands of horsepower. Browning and his team have tried every possible design and configuration they can think of in an effort to make this a reality. The concept revolved around some of the inspiration from my early years.

I used to fly model gliders and model airplanes. My father was an aeronautical engineer. His father was a pilot, so I guess it was in his blood, but his dream needed to be fulfilled. of flying also real physical demands. I spent some time in the Royal Marines Reserve and time in the Army and all the sports I played afterwards taught me a lot about the capabilities of the human mind and body. I'm not a great athlete, but I learned. a lot about how if you focus the human form on a challenge, whether you want to be an ice skater or a gymnast or whatever, it's amazing how this machine can adapt.

I got to the point with this bodyweight calisthenics workout where I could support my own weight in different types of unusual positions, like flags, for example, and I thought well, if you just replace that hard structure that I'm holding on to with a form of push, I can hold my body in any number of different types of positions. Flight positions as ridiculous as it sounded, I thought, well, let's go and experiment with it first. He needed to figure out how to stay suspended in the air. The form of thrust I landed on was gas turbines. Gas turbines are known for having a very small shape.

Extremely aggressive factors: A gas turbine weighs five pounds and produces about 50 pounds of thrust, so in 2016, Browning began testing different components and variations, so it experimented with one, we went to two and then four, and it was becoming more and more convincing, but things were not. Not everything always goes so well through a lot of trial and error and constantly failing to be honest and then learning all the time from those safe bundles we got to a point where we managed to achieve a flight and it was two motors on each arm. and it had engines in each stage, but there were basic problems in each stage, starting with the decision to have engines in each stage.

There are a number of interesting challenges with that model, the problems included that the engines were only three or four inches off the ground in terms of the exhaust pushing the violence of the air coming out of those engines to about a thousand miles per hour and hitting even concrete. , you could see that a smooth concrete surface was starting to sting from the sheer violence of that air and yet as you move away from them the violence of the speed decreases, it was also a challenge to have the motors in your legs as if you move your arm motors anywhere near the lower motor intakes, we noticed that you are getting air in through ducts. and that would then increase the temperature of the exhaust, you could see a little puff of sparks and the engine would just die down, so that was another good reason for not having engines there and finally we learned a strange human behavior which is that when your feet feel the ground and the Earth abandoned them, they almost want to pedal and dig looking for where that surface is.

That doesn't help when you have 50 pounds of thrust coming out of your leg and those problems led to the solution of moving those motors. slowly down the body and then consolidating them into one and essentially that created a skirt at the same height on the body that can be compared to the three legs of a tripod, there is a push that comes out of each arm and then essentially a third leg comes out. from the back of your body that provides that amazing stability and that's how we learn to fly. I can explain what the components are, so basically you have an arm mount that your arm goes inside of that 3D printed aluminum tube of yours. a micro gas turbine on each side and you have the same thing on the other side, obviously, and in the back there is one more engine that is approximately the power of these two combined.

Up front, you have a lot of the electronic control here. The systems and the batteries that aren't plugged in here, those batteries actually run the starter motors and the glow plugs and then on the sides you have a couple of fuel tanks. We also have a helmet, but it's especially lightweight and the Plus, there's a head-up display system, so inside you can see the lenses that actually paint on my vision, the fuel and engine data, that data gets to the lenses at through this little device that receives a wireless feed from the

suit

that shows me everything that has to do with the engines and everything that has to do with the fuel to give you an idea of ​​how close we are to running out of fuel, for example , last year Browning set the

world

speed record for a body-controlled jet suit.

Reaching 32 miles per hour, he says the suit can actually fly much faster and higher than they've ever tried, but for now they're playing it safe because even at lower speeds and altitudes there are still risks of the fuel be diesel. or jet fuel are fundamentally the same fuels Jeff it will sound scary but it's the same kind of thing diesel is actually not prone to forming clouds of vapor it is not really explosive in fact it is very difficult to even ignite it and even if it burned uncontrollably , you probably have 1015 seconds before it turns into a big fire.

Every time we fly, we have fire extinguishers all over the place within two years of doing this. We have never used concerned fire extinguishing, but I have respect for the fire aspect, the heat aspect, it's funny, but if you take a hair dryer and press it against your head, you will burn your head, hold it at about two feet away and it is cold, the specific heat capacity. The amount of air is so poor that the heat actually dissipates very quickly and I even ran those motors up my leg in these heavy cotton flight pants, all it did was slightly singe the top surface of the fabric.

I don't do anything, so from a heat and fire standpoint, it's not really a major concern, but we get it done. He is more concerned about falls and collisions. It's like riding a sports motorcycle, if you've done that, eighteen hundred miles an hour. around small, winding roads and go out, it will hurt if I'm ten feet off the ground and have engine failure. I'm just going down, there is no scenario in which our system can suddenly and uncontrollably gain altitude or shoot to the side. you just fall, which is not a good thing, but we always have to take into account the possibility of an extremely unlikely mechanical failure of one of the motors and in which case you fall, that's why we keep the height quite limited in terms of speed.

We can easily go 35 miles per hour, so we've gotten quite a bit faster in testing, but again, for most of what we do, by the time you get to 35 miles per hour, you're probably far away from the audience. or the area you're flying in, so by then you'll be back again, we pushed the limits a little bit more over the water because that's a little more forgiving if you could if you fell into it, so the brownies jet suit no longer It's just a pipe. Dream, but what exactly is it for? They recently started custom designing and selling them, but at around four hundred and forty thousand dollars per suit, it's safe to say it will be out of reach for most, but that could change as we get better. the efficiency of ease of use then there is the potential for I don't want to see public transportation right away, but we have developed something that allows humans to move in a completely unprecedented way, one of the biggest challenges. to reduce costs by designing suits that are more fuel efficient, this model currently burns about a gallon of fuel per minute, that is one of the reasons they are working on an electric version and a set of wings that, when deployed in mid-flight, they would generate more lift. efficiently, they also hope that some competition will stimulate innovation throughout history when two human beings said: I think mine is Boston, the newest one that goes further, so next year 2019 we are building a series of races to This, yes, a racing series, think Formula.

One, but with the jet suits, we've already had several pilots break the record so far, it's five minutes and five minutes of air time, so we can have a group of young guys and girls and compete with thousand horsepower jet suits. force on the water to keep it safe. but to do something that only people have seen before in a Marvel movie and it's going to push the boundaries like it's nothing. I think for the foreseeable future it will be entertainment, it will inspire people and really drive the journey. to create a revolution in human transportation