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 [Music] [Applause] [Applause] I first heard of this company gravity back in 2017 when YouTube graciously served me a TED talk called how I built a jet suit by a gentleman named Richard browning I followed Richard and his company closely for the last two-and-a-half years and I got 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 his company as you can imagine I was insanely excited I had been thinking about this exact moment for over two years I cannot believe this is happening oh my god my brain is not processing what is actually happening sometimes dreams really do come true this is insane you can't exactly just strap on the jet soon and expect to be able to zip around like browning and his team can this takes time words like epic insane crazy all come to mind when I think of what it felt like to have that suit on I could not process it at the time I'll do my best to describe what it was like on that platform first he gets strapped into a harness that attaches to the tether so you don't accidentally fly away or come crashing down then you put the suit on by sliding your arms into the arm mounts and strap the rear-engine to your torso the suit is pretty heavy but hey this thing literally makes you fly I felt more badass at this exact moment then I ever had before going into this first attempt I thought the trigger worked like a gas pedal in a car or a motorcycle throttle meaning the more you push or twist the more power you get but that is not the case it's more like a cordless drill that has adjustable power levels it's basically off or at full power but that max power level can be finely tuned gravity starts most clients at what is effectively 20 stops below full power in order to get used to the turbine spinning and distributing force as soon as I pulled the trigger I felt an incredible force from all three of those points the engines on my arms and the one on my back the force sort of makes you lean over a bit similar to standing in front of a desk or countertop and leaning on it with your arms the proper way to hover is to bring the Jets up to full power and then vector your arms down thus lifting your body off the ground all while sort of leaning on the force the engines are exerting but since this was my very first attempt I didn't really know what I was doing so I kind of just hopped around and felt the power and what you see the pilots doing here are signaling to increase the power of the suit one nudge at a time I had a brief chat with Richard after my first test flight and he gave me a few pointers I'll be honest I wasn't satisfied with round one because I hadn't really achieved a proper hover round to my focus here was on positioning my arms properly to achieve a hover and this right here this six or so second hover marked a pivotal moment for me feeling the tremendous power of the five jet engines suspend me in the air even for just a few seconds gave me an overwhelming sense of joy I was really excited it also really made me want to keep trying but alas a session on the tether lasts just two minutes because the Jets burn about a gallon of fuel every minute so as it stands even untethered flights lasts only about two minutes but that is not stopping Richard and his team from continuing to push the boundaries on what's possible for the jet suit here's what a jet suit consists of and how to operate it we have five gas turbines two small jet engines on each arm and then you've got a large one on the back and that's burning fuel which then expands into a gas which turns the turbine and that basically is just chucking a load of hot gas that way so you are 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 kind of flare them out that means that all the force is going out with you're not going to go anyway as you bring those down you point them down you're gonna start to go up you've got a control system which is a trigger in the right-hand arm out and a nudge switch in the left-hand arm out so you can control the max power of the suit and the trigger is just for you to bring the power all the way up to full power for your body weight while you're training the best thing that we want to see you doing is holding those engines at full power out like that and you'll be wrestling the thrust a little bit you but you should be able to stand there and stay still then like exactly what you're doing you vector down and at that point you're propelling that gas down so you're gonna go up good thing about this is rather relying on the throttle control of the engines to adjust your height because you're running at a constant power you're throwing that thrust using your body the thrust is augmenting your body so that's why we have the most minimal amount of kit possible like riding a bike you become one with it as as you're cycling along you don't really think about riding the bike it's the same thing with this but in many more dimensions so it's much more dynamic to fly by just throwing your arms around than it is controlling a throttle this is the main control board this is what converts your hand controls into a signal that the engines can read and so they know what kind of level to go to but each engine you've got an engine control unit behind there there's one behind there one behind there and then the one for the rear Internet is up there as well and you've got these micro GSU ports which is for this which is our kind of ground support unit so this is how I can kind of I can plug into any one of your engines and spool it all of the suit is 3d printed this 3d printed in aluminium which you can see there those are the shiny sections and nylon and then we have some 3d printed steel on the back this is black coated 3d printed steel and that is actually the ballistic protector for that rear engine same with these aluminium sections here you can see around the turbine blade we've actually got the aluminium then a layer of Kevlar in here then another aluminium layer on the top so there's a starter motor for each turbine that kind of kick starts it and then it will inject a little fuel and then there's a glow plug and then it starts off the kind of a combustion process and from then on it's kind of self-perpetuating now let's talk about Richard browning who is he and what's his background and why did he build himself a flying machine did he just wake up one day and decide to do this take me to sort of what you were doing prior to this being a part of your life and was there just kind of one day where you woke up and you were like today's the day I'm gonna go buy a jet turbine and put this thing on my arm what was your life like then and what was that moment of decision making to purchase one of these yeah yeah good question so actually the majority of my kind of normal career if you like was as an oil trader I used to work in the city of London I used to you know actually buy and sell cargoes and move ships around the world I used to do some interesting business development traveling around but nothing you know that exotic that was quite an interesting challenging job I spent about six years in the British Royal Marines Reserve alongside my day job as well and my whole I'm giving you the ingredients here of the rationale my whole family history was from the world of Aeronautics and engineering so one grandfather surveys all black who used to run the UK's main helicopter business my other grandfather was a wartime pilot and civil pilot as well and my late father was an aeronautical engineer and maverick and designer and inventor so I think a lot of that all has always been there I've always loved making and building and breaking things you know when I was a kid and that never really went away I probably chase in the end the oil industry job because it was interesting and challenging I love the deal-making side of it and the meeting interesting people around the world but you know it paid very well that somewhat liberated me over the years to gradually have the I suppose the freedom of mine you know the financial freedom as well with my family to start doing more and more interesting things and I mean interesting in the sense of when you see a challenge and you think I wonder if I could do that like getting your Green Beret in the wrong Marines you think that would be really cool if I could do it I'm not really sure if I can but if I can it will be super cool and I did enough of those things in the early part of my life that I got used to the fact that probably four out of five times when I have one of those ideas it doesn't work out and you have to live with a failure and then every now and then it the one success in those five makes all the failures worthwhile that's very much that innovative kind of spirit it's a tough journey but the highs hopefully outweigh the the frequent lows if you like so putting all that 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 bodyweight like like you know we're sitting on this stage here now that that stage is exerting a force on our rear ends enough to keep us to hover on the stage right so if you swap the stage out for the momentary support of some form of propulsion and that propulsion rather than going up through your rear end because I'm sitting in a seat rather than that what if some of it was actually on your arms because you can move your arms so well we're so good at being consciously aware of where our arms and hands are what if you actually had the propulsion some of it on your hands if I can lean forward and you know all this gymnastic stuff I used to do if you can lean forward you know in a planche type position and do that well I surely I can just lean on those engines so that all of that was what inspired me just to go well let's just go try this and I knew enough about jet engines and gas turbines to be confident off two by one very early stage come aircraft engine and that one first test you know you've seen the TED talk with it in the footage yes Danny ran in a lane with one sort of bolted to an aluminum tube that was probably one of the biggest leaps of knowledge in the whole journey because any sensible engineer would look at it on paper and go it's gonna consume a ridiculous amount of fuel it's gonna get really hot it's gonna be massively dangerous it's gonna whip around like a fire hose does obviously because fire hoses do that don't they and with that spindle spinning at nearly 120,000 rpm it's gonna have such a gyroscopic momentum like when you spin a bike wheel and hold the spindle you're never gonna be able to spit so you'll need like counter-rotating pairs of them and oh my god this is all pointless I'm not gonna try on the other hand you don't ever go and realize nearly all of those assumptions are absolute rubbish and so that was the probably biggest step and then you saw all the steps beyond there over 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 jets suits richard has 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 themselves by doing some really unique and extraordinary things in 2017 Richard set the Guinness world record for fastest speed and a body controlled jet engine powered suit he hit 32 miles an hour and then just last month in November of 2019 he shattered his own record and hit 85 miles an hour logically speaking here the risk of injury increases drastically as you climb higher and go faster whilst we're pushing boundaries here we take an attitude of every risk we take has to be recoverable so jumping over a truck here or whatever that's about as high as I want to go because he forget an engine failure then it's gonna hurt enough but I'll be okay so I'm falling off a motorbike right it's not gonna be a great day out am I gonna go fly over this hangar I could do but if I get a failure I'm not gonna be able to have another go right I'm not gonna be able to keep this journey going I think it's safe to say that Richards journey is extremely unique and he's been able to keep going because of how gravity operates as a business the exploratory approach that has got us to building these things we apply to the commercial side as well because there is no rulebook of how you make a business out of these things I mean there's but there's obvious things like you know doing air shows in client experiences what's ended up happening is that having done some really high-end events we did something at ICON ik mark zuckerberg you know private office event and stuff we've done some ludicrous things opened baseball games in Japan done car launches in China every time we do one it tends to go on the national media in that country everybody goes oh my god it's real it's not just something on the internet that's kind of faked we get a whole extra boost of credibility and then another wave of people come in and go could you come to our corporate you know we've got a Cisco annual gathering and this is a real one in a month's time I think you know can you come and do a keynote on the innovation journey and can you come into a flight demo and so this is the 95th event in 30 separate countries where we we all one of my pilot's have done a bit in what two years yeah two and a half years and that's exactly what the gravity team was doing in California the company is based in England and came to this private airport to train clients from all walks of life so what's next for the future of the jet suits and gravity as a company is there a point and I mean you're kind of like everything you're doing now seems like you're just kind of going with your gut learning as you're going right so will these kind of become like can I get one in ten years and fly to work in New York versus riding an electric skateboard so you know the honest answer is who knows the reality where we are is that we've done all these events around the world we built a big audience we've really refined the technology to not a bad state we trained loads of people I mean you've seen you know some people here are pretty much ready to come off the tether by the end of one day it's ridiculous how quick it is to learn I think you know the end of day what is the point of this what is the net impact we're having well people kind of lose their minds in a childlike way of seeing a human being fly around so when you look at something like Formula One or IndyCar or NASCAR you see vehicles that have not they're not very practical at all they don't do much for you okay but they massively entertain you they inspire you and they push technology so our plan at the moment is to build a race series we film one already we're up to four five six pilots are all starting at a sort of you know traffic light system you know like their drag race lights lights go green everybody hammers off put immediately to 40 50 miles an hour over water relatively low so it's safe pulling around pylons if you think like the Red Bull Air Race type format we're gonna run those the plan is around the world in overwater and interesting places so we should have one in Bermuda and March and it's the obvious graduation direction so you know you were getting on really well there right so with a few more goes you'd be there over some grass like three feet over the grass where you've no tether but you know that at any moment if you have a wobble you just flare on you're down straightaway write a few more few goes over grass you're ready to go over water and then you really can just do what you like to an extent you still don't want to go really above about twenty thirty feet but you are completely free and you can join us you know come on racing in Bermuda this progression of building these suits now your attention and focus is developing the racing series yeah you're doing all the types because because as soon as I say mines faster than yours you're gonna put loads of effort and trying to find ways to go faster than mine it human spirit is all about competition yeah think of all the evolution that's come out of IndyCar and Formula One and it's it's I think that is a wonderful way of supersizing the impact we have on audiences but also accelerating the technology now in parallel we carry on doing events we carry on claim you know training clients but also will get rapidly towards back to your point maybe some technology that is actually more mainstream sensible we built an electric version of this for instance and it works the challenge is that the weight of the batteries means the flight time is kind of crazy it's like seconds if that battery technology enhances then maybe you could have something that will go and take you you know in a similar manner to that right it doesn't need to everybody can hear what that is it doesn't need to take you very high you could just drift along you know at six feet above the ground you can have a human enveloping airbag system if there was a problem and the radar pinging kind of parking sensor technology make sure you don't go too high or too low that might well be your modern-day scooter replacement how do we get there we get there by feeling the journey from something like a racer so that's where gravity Industries currently stands they've successfully built multiple fully functional jet packs or jet suits as they're technically called Richard browning is a modern-day Tony Stark he's basically a superhero at this point it's been amazing watching the progression of the company since I first saw the TED talk two and a half years ago and again being there in person seeing this thing in action is epic I think going into 2020 and Beyond will see gravity continue refining the suit from a design and functionality perspective which can increase flight time they'll dazzle new crowd in more countries and get the racing series underway browning is one of the most ambitious people I've ever sat down with and his drive is really inspiring so no matter what it is you seek out to do in your lifetime just know that anything is possible even human flight to Richard and the entire gravity team thanks for having me out there and thank you for doing everything you do you've changed my life and many others and I can't wait to fly again [Music]

Channel: Sam Sheffer

Views: 2,547,351

Keywords: sam sheffer, JET SUIT, RICHARD BROWNING, GRAVITY, gravity industries, jet pack, jetpack, jetsuit, real jet pack, iron man, real life iron man, hover, flying like iron man, human flight, can you fly like ironman, iron man flying, iron man tech, electric jet engine, iron man suit, ironman flight, gravity jet suit

Id: Ic082qZELNE

Length: 16min 43sec (1003 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 01 2020