Shocked spectators look up to witness something no one has ever seen before on this stretch of water – a man flying low overhead with jet turbines strapped to his arms and back, travelling at 60mph towards the Isle of Wight.
The man is Richard Browning, a 40-year-old ex-oil trader and part-time inventor, now turned full-time entrepreneur, engineer and test pilot of the world’s first patented jet suit. His journey wasn’t always quite so glamorous though.
It started in March 2016 when Browning was still a suited-and-booted businessman. His first test ‘flight’ was in a country lane with a turbine strapped to one arm and fuelled through a tube from a bucket. “I was working at BP,” says Browning, “and I used to do this at the weekends because there were quite a few reasons why it shouldn’t work. But then, if that’s your starting point, there’s a chance you’re going to hit upon something that’s brand new.”
Trial and error
After the test in the lane proved the adequacy of the thrust, Browning moved on to strapping a turbine to each arm and one to each foot. It took nine months, 310 test flights and nearly as many falls to arrive at the current specification. But it was the experimental spirit of trying something new and testing it almost immediately, without fear of failure, that Browning credits for his eventual success.
“If you want to be an innovator, an entrepreneur or a pioneer of something,” says Browning, “you’ve got to be able to survive the fact that most pathways will be a waste of time. But you’ve got to keep getting back up, keep taking the lessons and keep adapting.”
A quick look into Browning’s gene pool and this pioneering aeronautical spirit becomes instantly explicable. His father, Michael, was a part-time inventor who, around 30 years ago, devised a novel concept for a folding bike, and pioneered headset-mounted mountain-bike suspensions. As a child Browning junior and senior would make and fly model gliders together. One of Browning’s grandfathers was a wartime and civil aviation pilot and another, Sir Basil Blackwell, was the chief executive of Westland helicopters.
Clearly flight of some kind or another was something Browning was born to do, a realisation that dawned on him only belatedly. “It’s kind of a question of what the hell was I doing in the oil industry rather than anything else,” he says.
His background, together with his love of fitness and appreciation for the capabilities of the human body – Browning was an ultra-marathon runner and Royal Marines reservist in his spare time – gave him the starting point for his idea – to build an aircraft out of the human body rather than around it.
“What if you took away the seat and the control system and used your whole body as the flight control and flight structure and used your brain as the gyro and the ECU? How feasible would that ludicrous vision be?”
Browning began with the assumption that the arms could provide the main source of balance and directional control for such an aircraft. He took two lightweight, off-the-shelf gas turbines and strapped one to each arm. At first he aligned them with the fists but found that maintaining balance was extremely difficult. Moving the turbines just a few inches up the arms did the trick, making him feel “like a trapeze artist” dangling underneath the thrust rather than a gymnast trying to balance on top of it.
Like learning to ride a bike
The resultant stability hugely increased the ease of hovering. Likewise the leg thrusters moved gradually up the legs, finally becoming the back-mounted single engine of the current design.
Apart from the added stability there had been a problem with the leg-mounted turbines blowing out air at 1,000mph and 750ºC, burning grass and even melting the surface of concrete. There was also an incident where a leg-turbine intake sucked in the hot exhaust from an arm turbine, instantly melting the fingernail-thin blades, with predictable consequences for the pilot.
A video captures the first six seconds of sustained flight across a farmyard in Wiltshire. You see clearly by the smile on Browning’s face that something has clicked. It’s the same reaction he has seen from the few dozen others he has trained to fly the suit. It’s a process he compares to learning to ride a bike – once the initial movements and balance are acquired the act of steering becomes completely unconscious. You just look where you want to go and your body takes care of the rest. “It’s that moment where the flight control computer in your head just takes over,” he says.
Steering 'becomes completely unconscious'
Throughout flight testing Browning wasn’t just forced to overcome the challenges of gravity but the assumptions of the mainstream engineering community. Some of these were that the human body would not be able to cope with the force of the thrust, or the gyroscopic effect of the spinning turbines, not to mention the heat given off by the exhausts.
None of them turned out to be correct, which Browning illustrated simply by going out and testing. The torque effect of a turbine spinning up to 120,000rpm didn’t rip his arm off because the mass and length of the turning blades was so small and the acceleration gentle.
The heat didn’t incinerate his toes for the same reason a hairdryer pressed against the skin will burn, but one held just a few inches away feels pleasantly warm. “The specific heat capacity of air is so pathetic, it’s really not a problem,” says Browning.
Nothing proves critics wrong like physical evidence, and Browning’s suit is one rather sexy-looking testament to the raw power of testing. The machine that once used a throttle trigger from a hammer drill is now a complex composite of 3D-printed aluminium, steel, titanium and polymers. And the helmet has a built-in head-up display feeding back data on engine performance and speed.
Browning’s company, Gravity Industries, has gone from a one-man inventor in a garage to a 30-person team around the world which is financially self-supporting.
Family tragedy
There is added pathos to Browning’s journey of success when one discovers that his father committed suicide when he was just 15. “The UK’s not short of eccentric entrepreneurs in garden sheds doing often amazing things,” says Browning with an unmistakable note of sadness and pride. “Unfortunately it cost my father his life. There are not that many examples of British entrepreneurs who manage to commercialise their ideas. We have.”
As befits such an innovative idea, new projects abound. Technical ones include an electric version, as well as developing the transition from vertical take-off and landing to aerodynamic flight. “Think the F35 or the Harrier,” says Browning. Like the Harrier, Gravity is experimenting with transitioning the jets between downward thrust for take-off and landing and horizontal thrust for forwards flight. Together with the aerofoil attachment used in the Solent flight, it has enabled a maximum speed of 74mph while at the same time backing off the engines by 15%.
Browning has twin turbines mounted on each arm
Browning thinks he can take the performance even further. “You can imagine a future where you don’t need to be running the engines at 1,050hp other than for take-off and landing, and in the meantime you can back them off potentially over 50%, saving a huge amount of fuel, but cruise at a ridiculous speed and fuel a long distance.”
In terms of commercial projects, Browning’s calendar is filled with events, air shows and demonstrations. He is also in talks with several of the new media channels such as Netflix and Amazon Prime about televising a race series – literally a group of competitors racing these jet suits around a course.
Not surprisingly, Hollywood has also come knocking, with stunt coordinators from James Bond and Mission Impossible showing interest for upcoming films.
Does Browning envisage a future where these devices would be available to the public? His answer is ambivalent. He says it will never be something people use to go to work, but he adds an immediate counterpoint: “The first motor cars were considered noisy, smelly, inefficient and a joke compared to the transport of the day which was a horse, and look what happened with the evolution of that.”
Excitement at the frontier
Browning doesn’t have much time for far-off visions. He is too excited about current developments, specifically the improvement of the suit’s forward-flight capabilities, allowing him to set new top speeds on a regular basis. “That for me is one of the most exciting engineering frontiers because no one’s really done this before as a human,” he says.
“We’ve made so much progress with most kinds of aircraft that we’re never going to get back to those pioneering times of the 1800s and early 1900s. But I feel that in a tiny way we’ve captured a little corner of that same excitement when it comes to human flight.”
Suit specifications and performance
Made from 3D-printed aluminium, steel, titanium and polymers
Power: 1,050-1,500bhp
Turbines: 5
Rpm: 120,000
Fuel: Jet A1 or diesel
Dry weight: 27kg
Flight time: 5-10 minutes
Longest flight: 4 minutes
Top speed: 74mph/ 120km/h
Altitude limit: 12,000ft
Highest flow: 100ft
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