Jet Suit inventor flies high at investment forum in Saudi Arabia
“Flying feels just like it does in your dreams,” says Richard Browning. He would know. Browning was the first person in the world to successfully strap jet engines to his arms and legs and take flight.
Browning’s contraption – a patented carapace of sorts
– is made up of five miniature jet engines and a fighter pilot helmet. He recently demonstrated it, much to a captivated audience’s delight, at the Future Investment Initiative (FII) in Riyadh, when he hovered for a few minutes outside the host venue. The event was held at the Ritz-Carlton from October 29 to 31.
At FII, a convening of the world’s jet-setting elite, one can bump into robot inventors, the top brass at Saudi Aramco, Brazil’s president and an American astronaut who helped build the International Space Station, among thousands of others. But it was Browning’s Jet Suit that had most people swarming.
“The spirit of the Apollo programme, the Kennedy space mission, the Wright brothers, the wartime drive to build the first jet engine aircraft, all of those lump-in-the-throat journeys against adversity … we tap into that similar spirit,” says Browning, founder and chief test pilot at Gravity Industries. “It is such a humbling thing.”
As the auto and aviation industries race to automate systems and take humans out of the driver’s seat, the Jet Suit is a captivating counterargument to keeping humans in control. And Gravity Industries has plans to make it mainstream – and advance the technology – through racing. He imagines head-to-head racing over bodies of water, since the suit has proven safe in watery crash landings, with the spectacle taking place in coastal cities or tourist hubs.
Formula One ignited automotive technology in the 1940s, the Cold War spurred the United States to the Moon in 1969, and entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk are now squared off in the commercial space flight race of the 21st century. Browning thinks racing the Jet Suit could help advance the technology. “We’ve got a chocolate box of attributes: human personalities, drama, speed, Iron Man-like stuff,” he says.
At the moment, the world’s first patented Jet Suit can top speeds of 80.4kph and can reach an altitude of 3,657 metres. The company also has seven trained pilots who Browning says are ready to race.
Two test locations in Los Angeles and outside London will let non-professionals test out the suit for £5,000 (Dh23,800), or one can buy the whole mechanism for £340,000 and fly under Gravity supervision. So far, no one has gone to the emergency room, says Artem Gamzin, who manages business development for Gravity.
As of now, the public engagements are footing the bills for the team of 30, who mostly reside in the UK. For instance, Gravity was paid about $20,000 (Dh73,450) for attending FII, according to Gamzin. The company hasn’t taken any outside funding since a seed round from a well-known investment team in March 2017. Only two months after forming the contraption, Browning nailed a test flight in front of father-son venture capitalists Tim and Adam Draper (the elder Draper is best known for his early investments in Tesla and Skype), and Gravity landed $650,000 from the billionaire investors after the demonstration in Los Angeles in exchange for 10 per cent equity.
For now, the biggest technical challenge is, in the immortal words of Chicken Run’s Ginger, “thrust”. The company is currently working on adding wings to the suit, both ones that resemble bat wings along the pilot’s shoulder blades and fins attached to the pilot’s ankles. Getting this right will allow the suit to go faster with less drag and increase its fuel efficiency, which would allow it to fly longer than its current 10-minute maximum flight time.
A video of Browning flying over crystalline waters in Bermuda shows him zipping along with a prototype of those wings – flying much faster than speeds that the jet engines alone can propel him to – and the effect is similar to a real-life Batman. “I’m now an aircraft,” he says proudly.
We’ve got a chocolate box of attributes: human personalities, drama, speed, Iron Man-like stuff RICHARD BROWNING Founder and chief test pilot, Gravity Industries