I'm Richard Browning, I'm founder and chief test pilot from Gravity and we
build these thousand horse-powered jet suits.
The concept was: people walking around on two feet are actually executing a quite
challenging balancing objective without really thinking about it.
Given my training background, could I lean on
the thrust as the support?
Messed around, ended up quite logically with engines on my arms
and then thought: why don't I put an engine on each leg?
But it was very hard because you're balancing all
four limbs like a sort of puppet.
So we moved the leg engines up to the waist area and
then eventually consolidated them into one rear engine.
Inside here, there's a little rocker switch, and you can nudge
up and down incrementally the amount of
power the whole suit puts out.
The trigger in the other arm assembly is
just a very crude throttle you squeeze a little bit and just comes on to full power.
You can't modulate the power very precisely like you can with this,
so in the Guinness World Records we did in 2017,
I really tried to turn sharply and I slid down out of the airflow and
needed desperately some more power and I couldn't access it because I didn't have
that control and ended up falling in the water.
At the end of some of the original runs I'd be flying fast,
I'd be very light because I burnt through lots of
fuel and I was desperately flaring my arms out to try and avoid climbing.
We can avoid all of that now because we've got the throttle nudge switch, as we call it.
The obvious visual difference is that nowadays we try to travel fast, we try
and generate some aerodynamic lift.
Even very crudely with this ram-air leg wing.
As I go faster and faster the air goes into these it puffs the leg wing out and
then that lifts my legs flatter which means the rear engine is now pushing me
forwards rather than being used just to lift me up.
You could think of these as like the feathers on an arrow.
Underneath there is a little 'kill switch'.
There's a little latching button to arm the suit.
You do not really push it in then you can hold the trigger down and
then a few seconds later the engines will start they come up to idle if
you're wearing the heads-up display it'll tell you in the heads-up display
when the engines are all finished and ready to go if you want to shut down at
any point - hopefully when your feet are on the ground because you could do it
in the middle of the air but the would be a bad idea - you just flip that button and everything
shuts down. So it's like a sort of emergency shutdown switch, but it's in
your control to do when you want. The harrier aircraft took off by swivelling
its nozzles down, then they'd swivel them back and you'd move forwards. We're doing
that but in a much more dynamic way. So we actually take off by accelerating the
power - feeling the power out to the sides - if you then start lowering your arms, you
gradually get lighter and lighter and lighter and a bit like a helicopter
lifting off you just drift up.
It's healthy to never lose sight of the risk you're taking here. To do anything
innovative and new, and hopefully pioneering, you have to go down pathways
no one's been before and take some degree of risk. Our rule is that risk has
to be recoverable. Even 48 hours ago in testing I had quite a big crash and
that's an example of where sometimes still things go wrong.
In terms of the future, our main focus at the moment be building a race series.
We can train clients to fly this in a day, so why not have a bunch of guys and
girls, maybe even from different sporting backgrounds, assembling over water or to
keep it safe and doing it in inner-city locations where you've got lakes rivers
and seafront, and have a sort of real-life Ironman
race course series to drive that inspiration, entertainment?
A bit like Formula One drives, and also drive the technology evolution.