Richard Browning

The real-life Icarus (wax-free)

Aviation is in my blood.

One of my grandfathers was chief executive of Westland Helicopters, the other was a wartime and civil pilot, and my late father was an aeronautical engineer. I used to build model aircraft when I was a kid, and even when I spent 16 years working for BP I never lost the passion for taking on challenges.

It’s all down to human balance.

There’s a TED talk on Youtube that shows all the ludicrous experimental phases, but we ended up with two engines on each arm and a slightly more powerful one on your back. The three ‘legs’ of that tripod give you stability but it’s also a very useful way of controlling flight: if you vector the engines down you go up; if you flare them you come down again.

Flying is a bit like cycling.

When you ride a bicycle you don’t consciously think about trying to balance it, you just think about where you want to cycle to – flying is as effortless as that. When you’re flying you’re not thinking about what you’re doing, you’re just going wherever your mind takes you. It’s a pretty euphoric, otherworldly experience.

I’ve flown in 33 countries.

We’ve flown in Dubai, South Africa, China several times, the Gold Coast of Australia, Rio, across Europe and all over America. Do I have a favourite? Flying around the HMS Queen Elizabeth aircraft carrier when it was visiting the American coast outside Washington DC was pretty epic.

We’ve used head-up displays for fuel and engine data.

It’s kind of cool but often quite flaky and complicated. The latest suit has got a little pendant system wired in, which is much more reliable and the crew can use it when you’re on the ground. AR tech still needs to mature, a bit like how smartphones did – early smartphones would crash a lot but they’re so robust and brilliantly usable now.

I love how elegant modern tech looks.

From the moment you open the box it’s a rewarding experience. Sam, who does all our CAD work, is a massive aesthetics enthusiast so everything tends to look cool and space-age. And why not? We’re building flying suits, right? We ride around in a Tesla X now as one of our deployment vehicles and launch jetsuits out of the falcon-wing doors. We don’t have to do that, but it actually works very well!

We love our Insta360 One X2 360° action cam.

It bamboozles people – even the BBC don’t seem to know they exist – and it’s made so many fixed-angle Gopros redundant. You just stick the thing on a stalk, then it edits out its own pole and films the world – it’s just brilliant.

Nearly everything we make is 3D-printed now.

In the early days I used to rivet and bolt aluminium extrusions together. Once you’ve done one you have to start all over again to build the next one, so you can’t really replicate very efficiently. Now we have a little £2000 Ultimaker that 3D-prints smaller things, but we also use companies that have multi-million-pound machines. It’s been an enormous enabler to us.

The engines aren’t printed but a lot of the housings and the backpack structure are.

Innovation is about risks.

You might look like a fool, you might hurt yourself and you might run out of money – maybe even all three – but as an entrepreneur or inventor you’ve got to just swallow that. Stuff will go wrong more often than it goes right, but if you can keep making those failures recoverable you can keep progressing.

Richard Browning’s book

Taking on Gravity: A Guide to Inventing the Impossible from the Man Who Learned to Fly is out now.

“WE RIDE AROUND IN A TESLA X AND LAUNCH JETSUITS OUT OF THE FALCON-WING DOORS”