Because there will be a lot of people that think this is fake anyway, I mean
you know, when you saw earlier it almost looks fake when it's right in front of you.
Ready? And three, two... One!
Hey guys! On our last episode of Make it Real my team and I flew down to
California to meet Richard Browning from Gravity industries to try out his 1,000
horsepower jet suit! Make sure you go check it out.
And if you haven't already make sure you subscribe to Gravities youtube channel
if they get enough new subscribers they might let me fly the suit at full power.
Anyway while we're there we also got to interview Richard one-on-one and learn
more about how he designed the jet suit and how it works. We also gave him a very
special gift to complete the suit. This might be one of the most in-depth
engineering interviews on the jet suit so we hope you guys enjoy, oh don't
forget to check out our vlog channel to see a 40 minute long extended cut.
There will be a lot of people that will think this is faking it when you saw it earlier it
almost looks fake when it's right in front of you.
I now see it as flattering when people still say it's fake.
All right! You're doing it you're living out every little kid's dream of flying like Iron Man
Let's start at the beginning. How does this actually like get started?
Because I know you've always been interested in flying and then you got
that one jet engine and you start playing, but what was the step that took
you to: Let's buy a jet engine and strap it to my arm. Richard: Yeah that's a very
fair question. Now I had a sensible job in London just
mostly sitting at a desk for about 16 years or so but I've always had a bit of
a habit I mean probably not dissimilar to you of seeing an interesting
challenge and just wondering well how feasible might it be to go and achieve
that thing whatever it might be and other bits in my life like things like I
spent six years in the British Royal Marines Reserve as well and in that
environment you get to learn a lot about you know human capability and pushing
your limits and all that kind of thing so if you if you marry together an
excitement for horse power and speed and flying with the fascination
for what human beings can achieve you know balance and strength and control
you think well this age-old passion of flying I wonder whether you could
approach it in a really different way and, to cut a long story short, morphed
into this idea let's just kind of cheat this with a bit of horsepower and then
micro jet engines, and you realize how monstrously powerful they are.
James: How did you, like, buy that one jet engine? In a bunch of our videos we've had viewers
be like where do you go and buy a jet engine and I'm like: It's online
you can literally order one online and it shows up to your door! Richard: It was a bit of a
discovery my family background was all in Aeronautics and things like that so
it didn't feel entirely alien to imagine the idea of getting hold of a jet
engines. I had no idea if this would work I didn't even know where this would take
me in the end but I justified to myself enough that just getting one of these
engines and starting to hopefully demystify a lot of the assumptions like
120,000 rpm torque would like rip your arm off and it would play all over the
place and the heat would roast you alive and I thought well let's just go and
carefully try this. They're really benign I mean they're
make an awful noise, right? And you don't want to point it at your face that's for
sure! James: We've got a video on that! Richard: Yeah, I know you have!
We've never done exactly that, but I, yeah. Probably one of the biggest
breakthroughs: Just having that one single engine and de-mystifying all those
reasons why this shouldn't work you know your spirit of just get your hands dirty
and learn I'd say at the point I bought probably the fourth or fifth one because
with four you can you can see in the films. Jumping around with four
of them it's like I didn't come down very quickly, it's like wow this is
this is getting there I just need a couple more and I'm there! But buying
engines five and six this is starting to get to an amount of money that
I'm gonna struggle to write off if this is gonna be a massive failure
another reason why we made such great progress is that I tried you know adapt
a piece of this existing technology, exactly like your ethos right, rather than
custom builds some hundred thousand dollar thing and then find when it comes
out the box it doesn't work. James: No point in reinventing the wheel!
Richard: I was constantly adapting stuff and that's tricky! James: So to give you some
perspective we ended up spending probably close to thirty or forty
thousand dollars just on what we did and we weren't even anywhere close to
getting that first flight and we're like: Well we gotta spend another 50 grand on jet
engines, break one and it's just like so now what? Richard: That was a really big issue
right so we went from one engine to actually doing that first
wobbly flight in about eight, nine months. Three of those months was waiting
for repaired engines to come back we have damaged and had repaired probably
50 as in: At least 50 times had them gone away and come back. James: That's hundreds of thousands of dollars!
Richard: But at least the repairs cost a lot less than buying them new, we've
completely written off probably four I would say. Money to get to the first six
second flight will be around yeah fifty to a hundred thousand dollars I'd say.
James: That was kind of the biggest thing that kind of slowed us down, we're just like
well we can either pursue this and maybe fail or we can continue focusing on
growing our YouTube business and becoming sustainable so we're able to do
random projects like this in the future and keep going so that's when we had to
kind of pivot away from flying like Ironman and into more of our some of our
smaller projects but now we're taking on bigger projects too and whatnot. In your
initial tests was it just you or did you have like a few friends? I started by
myself and then I've quickly grown my team and and it's so much easier with
the team as you can... Richard: Oh massively, yeah, I mean this started
as me and then after probably a couple of months the one major gap in my kind
of skill set was some of the software coding so there was a guy near me
who is a brilliant coder and I kind of
enrolled him. We've got now a team of approaching 20 in the UK and about ten
in the US and then there's this enormous network of people largely that just do
this for the passion of it I mean you've met some of the guys around here.
James: We all became aware of this suit, April Fools, 2017 , Red Bull. It was a brilliant
marketing idea, like, let's release this crazy thing on April Fools! So many
people were like: It's fake! Its fake! !ts fake! Richard: Right, the first year we didn't really
engineer that it's gonna be 1st of April it just kind of happened that it
appeared around that date. And then we thought let's just run with it anyway
because there will be a lot of people I think this is fake anyway I mean
when you saw it earlier it almost looks fake when it's right in
front of you. I now see it as flattery when people still say it say it's fake.
James: So when you hovered for the first time was it similar to Iron Man 1 when
Tony put on his jets? Richard: The learning journey that you see in the film where
he's kind of learning it and falling over and stuff we went through almost
entirely the same thing and the guys behind the CGI in the film, a lot of
them have reached out to us over the last year or so and actually they've
noticed in what we've done a lot of similarity and it's just all credit to
them for guessing and imagining what it would be like so it's really similar.
James: so when you learn for the first time did you say: Stark: Yeah, I can fly.
I'm an unusual case because when I did that first six second fly I spun round
and you can see me just grinning and smiling and I was mostly glad that I
managed to land it without falling over we take risk but we calculate what's the
worst that's gonna happen and if it's acceptable and I can get back up
physically but also financially and reputationally then we'll take the risk
our specialty is making a really cool video so sometimes we make it look like
it's really risky, but, believe it or not we have calculated the risk!
Richard: If you can't get up, it's game over right? Yeah if you've broken both your
legs and you run out of money and you've got arrested that's a really bad day out
but then you can't carry on. James: You want to start racing league with these. Where do you
want that to go? Richard: So I did this genuinely for the pure joy of the challenge, you
know, small opportunity to do it. When you look at something and, like, I
wonder if that's possible because if it is possible that could be really cool.
But what's next? Can we not have like 20 of those all kind of going around in a
circle and crashing a bit and celebrate who's driving them and whatever.
That for me is the obvious place to take this, from an entertainment point of
view, but mostly underneath that, if you're going to drive the technology
what better way of doing it than doing a racing series? But assembling those
people and then touring the world going through particularly, you know, big rivers
running through cities because then you've got the audience ready-made
they're jumping off the bridges in the Thames flying to the next
bridge, up around it, flying again... You know, you're covering the risk is you fall in
the water. The main reason for doing it all is to drive this stem agenda, you
know, celebration of what science and engineering maths can actually achieve.
James: Actually that's the reason why we do Make it Real, because it's opening that horizon of engineering
is cool! Let's celebrate that! Richard: It's critical to everything around us, right? And like
I say not only inspire a next generation to dare ask: What if? But also drive the
revenue that goes back into the R&D to develop cool stuff like wings!
That's the plan. James: So you've already pinned the market on flying like Iron Man, we've
got your suit, and we've got the Flyboard Air, we've got JetMan, we've got jet
pack aviation, we've got a whole bunch of different hoverboards that are like
multi rotor setups... Do you remember Inspector Gadget? Richard: I do!
James: Do you remember the helicopter hat? Richard: Yeah I do! James: I want to fly like Inspector
Gadget, so we're actually starting to design... Richard: Are you doing neck exercises? James: It'll actually be more of
a back thing, but we're actually going to be building a personal helicopter that
is compact! So we've actually got 275 kilowatt brushless DC motors with 1.5
meter carbon fiber props! Richard: Terrifying! Counter rotating? James: Yes, counter rotating. So we have a hollow
shaft and both motors are stacked on top of each other and in
total it will actually produce 240 kilograms of thrust. Richard: Oh my goodness! James: We're gonna
have those handles come down just like Inspector Gadget you're like: all right
I'm gonna go backwards, gonna go forwards. So we've already bought the motors, we
bought the propellers, we bought speed controllers... So we've sunk about 20 grand
into it so far, so hopefully you'll see me flying around a little bit. Richard: I mean,
fundamentally if you're, you know, the reason helicopter works so well even
though it's using a gas turbine it's moving a big air mass relatively slowly.
The bigger those blades you can make, while still having a compact
structure, the more efficient is gonna be. So it should be way more efficient than
this. But yeah, you've probably got more chance of cutting your own head off than this.
James: There is that issue. Richard: That's the only challenge! James: Alright, so we have some questions
from our audience you've probably answered them a hundred times before
but let's just go through them. Number one: How high have you flown? Richard: About eighty
feet, over water! James: How about concrete? Richard: Probably accidentally
25 for a few seconds, yeah trying to not make a habit. James: How fast have you gone? Richard: We've hit 50
miles, 54 miles an hour I think it is. The record that we set is down officially at
32 but we did 54 at that form of air show.
To be honest, with the power you can go way faster! James: Yes! Once you get the wings going!
James: How many suits do you have right now?
Richard: Four. James: Do you have a parachute? Richard: No... There's no point unless you can get
can get to parachute height and on the way up to that you're in a danger zone.
So if someone wants to buy one of these, are you selling them? Richard: Yeah we've sold two! It's not
our core kind of business, we don't wanna have loads of people flying around with
these necessarily because you don't know what you're doing, it's not the ideal
machine. We sold a copy of the prototype for a quarter-million dollars
not long after we launched the company and we sold the last one kind of a
smarter version of this to a guy in the US for about four about a hundred and forty thousand dollars.
James: So if anyone wanted to try this suit, can they and how would they do that?
Richard: Yes! So we offer flight training, particularly in the UK but, we've done it
elsewhere we've done it actually here in California. We have a tether system, a
platform and then all of that system keeps you entirely safe as you start
learning the balance and control, so it's training wheels for jet suits.
James: Alright, so why don't you walk us through the suit and just, how does actually work?
Richard: Right! So fundamentally now with the latest setup we've got it's five jet
engines, little gas turbines. You've got two on each arm yeah and then you've got
one around the back and between that those clusters of thrust that's what
creates that kind of tripod or pyramid of thrust and the control is all down to
really vectoring with your arms. Where do you point them? You point them down: you
go up. Point them out and then you go down again. The fuel bladders in
here they're basically like rubberized bags so you try and minimize the air
inside them and then around the front you've got this kind of waistcoat of
electronics. Inside the helmet there's a head-up display system which takes a
wireless data feed from this box so I can see my fuel burn and flight time and
engine status so that's quite a neat system!
So yeah, it's pretty simple and I mean this this is actually quite an
old model now, we've now got a version which is almost entirely 3d printed and
believe it or not in polymer! James: Speaking of versions, what iteration is
this? And what's your iteration right now? Richard: This is probably prototype 25 of
just this pair of arm assembly so, hard to say really.
James: When you get to iteration 42 , I have something for you!
Richard: Right! What's this? Oh you're kidding! James: So this is a full metal
Iron Man helmet. Richard: That's very cool!
Oh that's, that's insane! Oh no way! You're kidding! That's so cool! James: Perfect!
It's got a magnet ring... Richard: That is so cool! James: Tap it again.
Richard: The guys who build all the graphics for the film are massive
supporters of ours and come to every event! They were here yesterday!
So for our race series we're gonna build the right graphics, we should
get connected oh yeah! Huh! Oh it's quite weird having somebody do that
to your face ha ha ha yeah that's so cool!
Stark: Jarvis, you there? Jarvis: At your service sir. Stark: Do a whether and ATC check.
Jarvis: Sir there are still terabytes of calculations needed before an actual flight is ach- Stark: Jarvis...
sometimes you gotta run before you can walk. Jarvis: Importing preferences and
calibrating virtual environment. Stark: Check on control surfaces. Jarivs: As you wish
Stark: Ready? And three... two... one!
Richard: I'm looking through like a tiny little speck going: Huh! There's concrete, people, how high am I?!
Stark: Truth is... I am Iron Man.
Big thank you to the Gravity team for letting us come down to see the suit! If
you guys want to see me fly the jet suit at full power make sure you show gravity
some love and subscribe to them on YouTube. If they get enough new subscribers,
flying might be in my future. So please subscribe!
Oh! And don't forget to check out our vlog channel to see a 40 minute long extended
cut of the interview with Richard Browning! Links are right here and here.
Richard: I'm looking through a tiny little slit thinking: Huh! There's concrete, people, how high am I?!