Up and Away! Iron Man Takes Flight

With a giant roar, eight thrillseekers fired up their engines on February 28 and took off from a pier in Dubai’s marina to compete in the world’s first jet suit race. Strapped into their futuristic gear, they reminded many onlookers of the comic hero Iron Man.

With the combined thrust of some 1,700 horsepowers from five small jet engines, the pilots were able to defy gravity, speed across water at more than 100 kilometers per hour and zip around inflatable pylons in a thrilling competition unlike any before.

For DLD speaker Richard Browning, the event marked a milestone in his quest to invent a new way to fly. “There is something indescribable about hearing the wind-up of five gas turbines”, he told the audience at DLD Munich in 2018, when his jetpack was still at an experimental stage.

Powering up felt like being near a Formula One car or a jet fighter, the former Royal Marines reservist said. “It hits you in your chest, it hits you in your soul… And then you move around in three dimensions.”

Augmenting Body and Mind

His vision was “to approach the challenge of flight in an entirely different way”, Browning explained, “by augmenting the human mind and body”. By nature, he reasoned, humans are equipped with three abilities crucial to navigating air space: balance, control and strength. “Running across a field, that’s an amazing feat of balance and control”, Browning said – and all that was missing was the power to lift off and remain airborne.

Achieving this goal took many months of trial and failure. When you watch Browning’s talks at DLD18 and, six months later, DLD Campus Bayreuth, you can see him tumble and fall many times. But the crash landings laid the foundation of success. “As long as the failures were safe and controlled, that’s how we made progress”, Browning explained. “We learned vastly more from these failures than we ever did when it actually worked.”

One essential learning was not to strap jet engines to the legs – because the mind finds it difficult to control them when they feel out of balance.

“Your legs start doing all sorts of weird things trying to find the ground again”, Browning said, “which is usually okay, but not when you’ve got a jet engine attached to them, pushing with 22 kilos of thrust.”

In November 2016, the former oil trader completed his first controlled flight “in a kind of beaten up farmyard not very far away from where I live” near Salisbury in England, he told the DLD18 audience. “That’s where it changed from a crazy vision, a crazy dream, a crazy idea, into something that actually worked.”

A few months later he founded Gravity Industries to refine his patented invention and turn it into a business.

Cutting-Edge Development

It’s “little baby jet engines” that give pilots the power to levitate – micro gas turbine similar to those on a civil airliner, which “put out a massive amount of power, given their size and scale.”

With enormous thrust comes an enormous thirst, though. The jet engines run through almost four liters of jet fuel per minute, which limits flight time and requires the pilots to keep an eye on the fuel level.

But how? There’s no dashboard in a helmet, after all. So the developers turned to augmented reality (AR), a technology that enriches the user’s environment with digital information in real time.

“This is a really good use case for AR”, Browning explained at DLD18. “When you’re flying along, you can’t look down at any dials. Having a holographic projection in front of you, of your fuel and engine data, is just fantastic.”

To optimize the jetpack’s design, Gravity turned to additive manufacturing. “The whole suit is 3D printed now”, Browning told WIRED UK. “We’re always making them lighter, more comfortable, more compact.”

From Race to Rescue – and Beyond

To promote his invention, Browning envisioned a Formula One-style racing competition all along. “I’ve been flying these very conservatively”, he told the DLD audience in Bayreuth. “These things are ridiculously maneuverable and ridiculously quick.”

Browning’s own speed record is 136 kilometers per hour, and his company has already been testing other use cases besides racing. One of them: search and rescue missions. Gravity already completed test flights in the mountains and off the British coast to see how the jet suits compare to helicopter missions.

Ultimately, Browning’s hope is to take his invention much further even. “What we’d really like to do is accelerate this technology”, he said in Bayreuth. “We seem to have opened a door, accidentally, onto a whole new potential realm of human mobility.”

Yes, the technology was “ridiculously inefficient, noisy and pretty crazy” for now, he admitted. “But then, the first motor cars were considered to be inefficient, and no one really saw the potential of them” either.