Instant Genius - The future of human flight, with real-life Iron Man Richard Browning

Episode Date: April 26, 2021

In this week's episode of the Science Focus Podcast, we talk to the "real-life Iron Man" – not Marvel's Tony Stark, but inventor Richard Browning. He’s the creator of the ‘Jet Suit’, which can fly one person through the air at speeds of 135km/h. He’s also founder and chief test pilot of Gravity Industries and author of new book Taking on Gravity (£20, Bantam Press). He explains his quite literal rise to success – and the future of human flight. Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Sticher, RSS, Overcast Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Podcast: Why realistic humanoid robots need to learn to lip-sync Ritu Raman: Can you build with biology? Dr Erin Macdonald: Is there science in Star Trek? Meet the computer scientist teaching an AI to play Dungeons and Dragons How virtual reality is helping patients with phobias, anxiety disorders and more Dr Pete Etchells: Do video games encourage gambling behaviour? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world, find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Thomas Ling, staff writer at BBC Science Focus magazine. Today, I'm talking to the real-life Iron Man. Not Tony Stark, unfortunately, but the next best thing, inventor Richard Browning.

He's the creator of the jet suit, which can fly one person through the air at speeds of 135 kilometres per hour. He's also founder and chief test pilot of Gravity Industries, an author of New Book Taking on Gravity. In a moment, he'll explain his quite literalized success and the future of human flight. Richard, thank you very much for joining me today. My pleasure. So five years ago, you were a trader at BP, and now he was dubbed as the real Iron Man, somebody who's flown over 135 kilometres per hour

in a jacksuit. Quite a change. How did that happen? Yeah, that's a very fair question. Yeah, so there's a number of inspirations, really. I mean, one of them was that my whole family was from the world of aviation and engineering. I mean, one of my grandfathers was Sir Basil Blackwell, who used to be chairman and chief executive of Western helicopters

back when I was small. So yeah, at least 40 years ago. And my late father was an aeronautical engineer, a maverick inventor and designer. I grew up around him building and making things in his workshop. And my other grandfather was wartime and then civil airline pilot after that. So I guess it was in the blood, although I did indeed spend 16 years as an oil trader in the city. But I never really lost that passion for kind of building, making, taking things apart, you know, daring to imagine, you know, building, whether it was a physical, you know, creation or a startup. I sort of love that creationary journey and I guess I'd had enough experience, you know, at, you know, in a day job, as it were, and pursuing other interests of getting used to how most of the time these

ideas are pursuing an unusual idea don't really work out, but still scraping together enough enthusiasm to keep kind of trying the next thing. And the next thing back in 2016, in my mind was this seemingly and a slightly unusual idea of reimagining how humans could fly, not by sitting inside or on top of a flight machine, a flight vehicle, we're very good at that as a society for the last hundred years, but what if you could just add a bit of horsepower and use your brain as balance? Because, you know, walking around on two feet is a pretty amazing balancing feet when you think about it. But what if you, you know, used your body in your, you know, your arms as the flight structure? And I didn't really tell many people about this, but I set about just playing around with

the concept and seeing how far it would go. It was not inspired by Iron Man. I mean, I love the first film, the sort of building a crazy invention in a cave to escape. Everybody loves that sort of narrative. But yeah, it genuinely wasn't some childhood, I've got to build an Iron Man suit ambition. It was this idea of could you take to the skies and be free in that way by, you know, very much augmenting what we've already got from a mind and body perspective rather than just getting in a flight vehicle. That's kind of where it began. So in terms of like the equipment, like where did it all start? what was that the first thing that you got? Yeah, so fairly quickly, it became evident that, you know,

and I didn't really need to think very hard about this, but, you know, you can't flap your way. I'm not quite that mad. Flap your way or sort of jump your way. Using human musculature is so inferior when it comes to trying to get off the ground. It's just, you know, that's just not a non-starter. So clearly I had to look for a source of horsepower that was light, small, compact and controllable. And jet engines, I knew enough about gas.

from my family background, uh, to start playing with those. And to my delight, I discovered that the world of model aircraft and, um, I suppose gun target drones and drone jet engines, um, had advanced spectacularly to the point where something the size of a coffee jar could put out an enormous amount of power, uh, and was very controllable. It wasn't a science project to get the thing going. You could literally instigate start quite simply, quite quickly. Um, and so yeah, back in 2016, and there's the first TED talk out there and all of our social media out there, which if you scroll back down that social media,

you'll see the early origins of this consisted of me starting with just one and eventually two and then four and then six little jet engines affixed to various parts of my body to see if I could control and manipulate them. And yet, it sort of evolved like that. So what was the most sort of dangerous moment in this first sort of like testing period?

Like, were you sort of worried that these tiny jet engines would sort of rip your body apart? Yeah, so the bench testing we did first of all, that was the step to kind of get familiar with how the control, how to shut them down, you know, where the dangerous ends are and basically it's both ends. One's sucking very hard and one's blowing very hard and very hot. And you've just got to be very respectful of really the physics involved. And once you've got your head around that, actually the step of a fixing one to your arm, yes, it was quite a step to do that. But

we only did that once we had real, very confident control of the throttle and had an emergency shut them down. And the real realisation. that yes, you know, it's 700 degrees centigrade inside the engine, but actually it's amazing that the radiated heat from the exhaust really isn't very significant. To the point that I'm staring across the room here at one of our latest suits, and we use a 3D-printed polypropylene housing around the bottom of the engine. And that's fine because it's not in contact and the radiated heat is quite insignificant. So it's funny. One of the, well, there's about six very sensible assumptions that most engineers would make, you know, including my late father and probably his father

as well, as to why on paper this doesn't make sense and would never work. But you know what? When you find those assumptions, just sometimes underneath them, there is a discovery that people have never gone and found before because those assumptions were wrong. One of my favorite, if you like, is the gyroscopic moment. So anybody who's picked up a bicycle wheel held the spindle and then spun the wheel. You can do that wonderful experiment of trying to force it to move. And it's amazing how hard it is. It kind of fights you like a big gyroscope. Well, you know, 120,000 RPM spinning spindle inside that engine, you'd think that would be impossible to manipulate. Well, it turns out you don't feel anything. And it's because of the rotating mass is so small

away from the shaft. You know, the blades are the size of your fingernail. But you know what? The only way to find that out is actually to put one in your arm and gingerly fast, you know, fire it up and start manipulating it. And you realize actually, as per the grainy film in many of my talks and in the TED Talk shows, standing in a country lane in Wiltshire, with one on my arm and a mop bucket holding the fuel tank in it. Actually, it was just this spongy push. Like, actually, when you really think about it, it should be, because it's just the expulsion of air at about 1,000 miles an hour.

But it just feels like a hose pipe. If you close your eyes and ignore the noise, it feels like you're holding a fire hose. And it doesn't fight you whatsoever. So that's one of them. Another one is indeed the heat. Another one is you could never carry enough fuel. You could never control the power.

Oh, my goodness, you know, it's if you do a very crude bridge between, thrust and horsepower, and for those enthusiasts out there, will know that that's a bit of a fudge, but it comes out to about a thousand and fifty horsepower, what we're flying with. So again, on paper, you think there's no way it's just going to rip my limbs off, like you said. But then if you stop and think about it,

all I'm doing is leaning on them, and you can do a great experiment. If you go to a, you know, stand on your bathroom scales, note your weight, you'll maybe post-lockdown weight, and maybe not what you thought, lean forward on the bathroom sink carefully without ripping it off the wall and note when your recorded weight on the scales drops to a third of normal and then note how hard that is on your arms your roughly straight arms are just leaning on the sink with very little effort that's all we're doing to fly

because the engine on the back is doing the equivalent of the scale lifting and the sink is supplemented by or substituted by the four jet engines you've got on your arms you're just leaning on them So it's very easy to the extent that even my 13-year-old is now 14 even has jumped around doing a pretty good job of flying and he's got nothing of the muscular mass that you'd think you'd need to be able to do this. Yeah, I really love the videos of the initial test that you did. I recommend everyone go and see them.

One of what was really interesting is when you have sort of the jets strapped your ankles. I think when people think about Iron Man, they think about the kind of thrusters by his feet, but they didn't really work out in real life, did it? So yeah, it was fairly obvious that you put a little engine either side of each arm and it's quite easy for people to imagine,

I'm sure that the net thrust, the resulting force, feels like it goes directly up your arm, so you're just back to that leaning on the kitchen worktop or bathroom sink. Where do you put the rest of the power? Because that's only so good on your arms. And I did think that your legs are ideally situated to take your weight, so why not put them on the back of your calf muscles?

and also you've got the added advantage of being able to manipulate your legs in a very precise way. So I thought, well, maybe it will take some learning, but maybe that makes sense. And indeed, I achieved the very first flight back in 2016, around November 2016, I think it was, with an engine on the back of each leg and two on each arm. The challenge was you felt a bit like a puppet on a series of strings. Because as you lift off the ground, your brain gets a bit confused as to why you're now off the ground. It can feel there's nothing under your soles of your feet, but you're being lifted by the back of your calf muscles

and everything in your brain screams at you to start peddling your legs trying to find the ground. There's a sort of laughable analogy here with lifting a dog and holding it over a paddling pool. You'll find that they sometimes sort of pedal with all four legs trying to sort of prepare for swimming in the water. It's a funny kind of reaction. It's not quite that bad,

but I did find that I was finding it very hard to not only control my arms but also control my legs. And I did manage to do it for that very first six second flight, but it was immensely difficult. The other downside was that, you know, if you're trying to hold an engine, a jet engine, expelling air at 1,000 miles an hour, about three or four inches off the ground, the force of that air on the ground, you could see it visually chip away concrete. Yes, that was the first flight, but then very quickly those pair of engines proceeded up my body and loitered for some time around

my posterior, which is a great improvement, until eventually it evolved to be just one larger engine and it crept further up my back. And that, as we describe, it's sort of three-legged camera tripod arrangement of thrust vectors, you know, each arm and the one on the back, that has just become, I mean, just blissfully intuitive. We were training people last week. And we had two of our clients learn within six goes. Each go is only two to three minutes and learn to fly with that arrangement. What about the new kind of sort of squirrel suits additions that you've made to the suit? Like, what are they and how do they work? Yeah. So, So the logic here is that, okay, we're flying with vector thrust, you know, throwing enough air

downwards that you in a Newtonian fashion are propelled the other way. So, you know, the analogy is similar to firing a shotgun. You know, the pellets flying out the end of the shotgun at high speed is what pushes you the other way with the recoil. It's not the pellets hitting something that pushes you. It's funny how a lot of people assume that the air has to push off the ground to lift you. So that's how we fly. The parallel is actually not far off. with Harrier aircraft or the F-35 when they lift off the ground. However, both of those aircraft

then proceed to sort of gradually point that air backwards and propel themselves forwards, thereby transitioning to becoming an aircraft and generating lift from their wings. So we thought, you know what, why don't we carefully follow the same model because it's a lot more efficient to propel yourself forward and generate lift from wings?

So that was where the leg wing, the wing suit leg wing, ram air-filled legwilled legwere, came in. And we had some great success with that. We set the second of the two Guinness World Records with using that leg wing, because if people can imagine as the airflow increases beyond 30, 40 miles an hour, you need to put your hand out of a car window and you can feel that. It doesn't take much to start lifting your legs gradually flatter and flatter, which decreases your frontal profile, decreases your air resistance, but also importantly, that engine on your back starts pointing increasingly horizontal. You become a bit like a sort of human V, what was it,

V1, was it? That's a flying doodle bug. You feel a little bit like that. So that engine is starting to really propel you forward and you can feel it. I mean, you just transition and it's, you know, it's a, the Harrier folks talk about transitioning to aerodynamic flights. You can feel it. You can feel that you're starting to generate more and more lift with your body and that leg wing than you're needing to generate with the arms and the rear engine, and all of that then gets pointed backwards, and you feel the acceleration. I mean, we set 135 kilometres an hour, as you pointed out. But, I mean, you could go a lot faster. It just becomes increasingly dangerous as you watch the sea whipping below you.

What about, like, emotionally, how does it feel like flying in these sort of suits? When you are getting, like, 135 kilometres an hour. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't take the 135 kilometres an hour to deliver quite an off-the-scale feeling. there is something pretty magic about sitting inside one of these suits, you know, you're wearing it. It's as intimate to you as I think it is just about as possible to get or make a flying device to be. Everybody else watching gets kind of, you know, drowned by the crazy noise that you create, but the sensation when you're in it is quite peaceful. You just feel this gradually reassuring push on your back and on your arms,

and then you feel the weight come off your feet. And then much like a bicycle, it's as intuitive as a bicycle. at all about what you're doing with your hands after you've learned this, you just vector down and just lift off the ground. And then instinctively, there's a tiny little flare out with your arms to arrest the up-to-up-up motion. And then you can just sit there. And then once you're off the tether or on the zip wire, you can actually motor around and just go wherever your gaze kind of takes you. And I mean, it is not far off that dream that most people have at some point or several times during their lives of flying. You are completely free to go wherever you like

in three-dimensional space. And it is, I don't think it's unfair to say. It is, pretty euphoric. I mean, I've been doing this for over four years now. I must have flown several thousand flights. And every single time, it is just an amazing, liberating feeling to feel like you can go wherever you like. You're just in another world, really. So what would you do if the average sort of person came up to you and said, oh, I've got the $400,000 to buy one of these suits? Would you sort of give them into them street away, or would they need a bit of training? Like you sort of described it as riding a bike? Does it take that much time? Yeah. So firstly, I mean, we, yes, we have sold a couple, but in both instances, we've kept hold of the equipment and looked after it.

I mean, Ferrari do that slightly weird customer service with their most high-end Ferraris. But I mean, for us, it's just because, you know, once you've learned to fly one of these, it's perfectly very, very safe for you to fly it. It's just, it relies on your own sense of self-preservation to not just vector down and accelerate up and keep going. I mean, if you wish to do that, you can do that. I mean, same with a fast motorbike. you can accelerate it to 200 miles and out of a wall if you chose to. We never choose to do such a

thing with a jet suit, but we don't want to have the risk that somebody goes and kind of abuses it. So it's more common for people, and as I say, we've trained over 250 people now, to come along to Goodwood in the UK, or we used to do it in LA before COVID came along, and strap into the tether, and even after two or three goes, they can often learn to hover and safely fly around. And some of those clients have even, usually on day two, safely come off the tether and then flown around over grass or water and just had that experience. If they then, once they've achieved that stage, wish to commission their own suit, we go and build it for them. But you see, we've got to know them pretty well by then and see that they're sensible, you know, sensible, you know, head screwed on kind of people.

The analogy, again, you know, with a track day car is not dissimilar. You know, you don't just go and hand out an approximation of a Formula One car to somebody without quite a lot of preparation and training. It's the same kind of thing. So what are the kind of real world applications for these sort of suits? Like, do you kind of envision a future where everyone is commuting to work by Jetsu? Yeah, so firstly, I had not an inkling of an idea of building this into a business. It was genuinely just a joy-fuel exploration into something, frankly, mad, that I never thought would work as well as it's gone and worked. But having got to that point in November

2016, I thought, you know what, why don't we try and, you know, share this with the world and try and make it more than just a five-minute YouTube hit? And it opened so many doors. And such is life with such an unusual new creation. It sort of shone a light on a whole bunch of things that I'd never imagined. I mean, the obvious ones, and we've just recently been sharing some pretty spectacular footage of this, but special forces mobility, especially ship to ship or ship to shore and all that kind of stuff. Again, you can see a lot of this online. That is a world that I think beyond all doubt we've proven is going to change quite a lot thanks to what we've generated. But also search and rescue, moving paramedics in a sort of paramedic motorbike fashion, but

over any terrain to administer first aid and life support to people. You know, to be clear, we're not going to sort of Chinook-style string people underneath jetsuits and fly them to hospital. That's not what we do. But there's a great film on YouTube where we show what we did with the Lake District paramedic people in the UK. But also, you know, from an entertainment point of view, when you stop and think, what's the point of a Formula One car, it's a great way of generating new technology whilst also

entertaining people and generating revenue that goes back into R&D. and we've sort of taken a leaf out of their book, and that was what was behind the race series we were about to launch before COVID came along. We were three weeks away from getting on a plane with the team to Bermuda to launch that. That's still ready to go. And also, you know, you ask, you know,

we're going to go to the shops in a jet suit. I mean, yes, clearly not now. It's as sensible as taking a Formula One car to the shops. Not sensible, in other words. But actually, you know, the first motor cars were considered noisy, smelly and crazy and, you know, and rubbish compared to a horse. And look what relentless human.

improvement and ingenuity delivered in that field. So I don't stay awake at night worrying about to deliver that, but if I say to you that we're about to launch in the next few months the first electric version of this suit, which to my utter amazement looks like it's going to be quite competent off the tether, so not relying on a tether power source. You know, who knows, as battery technology advances, then, yeah, never say never. You've mentioned like the military applications of these suits. And I can kind of see how if you have a guy in a suit on one boat can easily sort of fly over to another. But I guess the question is, how long does it take to sort of get in and out of these suits? I think if you sort of landed on an

enemy ship, is it going to be a problem if it takes a few minutes to get out of the jet suit? Yeah, I mean, this could be a whole other kind of episode in terms of going into the details. It's amazing when people think of this that they imagine you should sort of hover around some battlefield blazing away with some mini gun on your shoulder or something. You know, the military doesn't work like that. It works in terms of fire and maneuver. So you're never trying to shoot whilst you're flying. It's just not how the military works. When it comes to boarding, getting special forces onto a ship quickly and safely, the only alternatives at the moment are people in boats with poles and hooks and caving ladders, and they bang around the side of an enormous high-sided cargo vessel

trying to hook a caving ladder before one at a time they climb up the side. I don't really need to point out how vulnerable and slow and difficult that is. The other option is dangling from ropes, on helicopters and one at a time sliding down the rope, again with your hands very active in that activity. We've shown, and we should be showing more of this on social media in the coming weeks, we've shown how within seconds we can fly from a hidden location straight on board a ship. And within, I think it took me three seconds

to free my hands up leaving the engines running, to do whatever I might need to do. I can also relocate around that ship or even just fly back off that ship if it turned out to be a bad situation. All of those capabilities are, alien to what happens at the moment. So you don't need to drop the equipment. In fact, if you leave it running, you can then just relocate, as I say. And if you do need to drop it, you can get in and out of it in about four seconds. So yeah, turns out that it's got quite some utility.

So at the moment, the sort of fuel-powered suits, how efficient are they? How loud are they? Very loud. I mean, you're expelling a lot of air through a tiny series of holes in these jet engines, and it does create a lot of noise. From a military perspective, that's turned out not to be an issue because you can come fast into a target, let's say, over water especially, and you don't hear it into the last minute. But yeah, from the idea of everybody in an urban environment flying these around it would be very unsociable, I would say,

because you've shrunk these jet engines down and gone on the opposite journey from what the civil airline community has gone on, where they make ever bigger, more efficient, larger diameter engines, you can imagine they're not very efficient. I mean, you're burning quite a bit of fuel to hold a human up in the air, much like a harrier in the hover or the F-35 in the hover is grossly inefficient. But we can still fly the latest version of the suit for about five or six minutes or so,

which doesn't sound long, but when you can launch from anywhere, land anywhere, and hit easily 60 miles an hour within a second or so, and there's no real obstacles, night or day, weather, you know, any kind of terrain. It's amazing what you can achieve with them. but yeah it's not there's not a parallel with sitting in the hover with a helicopter for you know an hour

that's not not what we do obviously due to the pandemic you're not been able to do the gravity race series you're not being able to go off showing off his flying as suit to big crowds but I take it there's still been

a lot of time in sort of research and development sort of what new things are in the pipeline apart from a sort of electric powered suit yeah I mean the COVID has clearly

been a massive frankly somewhat disaster for the world here We've done what we're good at, which is to adapt. I came from the corporate world where you couldn't adapt quite so quickly to these kind of things. We just obviously paused all these events around the world, which were a great source of revenue and building awareness and testing the equipment, frankly, in places like Dubai or India or Australia.

We paused all that, and I actually enjoyed, albeit remotely, going back to a pretty active program or very active program of R&D, and that's what's led to this next generation suit that I'm staring at across the room here, which, if I'm honest, we got so swamped by, events that the R&D would suffer a bit. So we've actually enjoyed the time to be able to progress the technology. So it's lighter, more powerful, flies further, more robust, all of these good things. Easier to fly as well. I mean, things like the suit now, even without a life jacket, is buoyant and self-rights the pilot if you fall in the water, all these important things from the military

of search and rescue point of view. All of that is delivered and has been a huge leap forward. But also things like the electric suit, things like a much enhanced control. control system and all this kind of thing. We just managed to advance it rapidly. So, yes, we haven't been out so much. We've enjoyed getting out and doing some great filming work. And we managed to film some fun stuff with Top Gear during lockdown because filming was still allowed, which we were very grateful for. We were able to travel with the military. We got, I can't say where we went, but we managed to get on a C-17 cargo plane, transport plane, with our seven-ton truck and a couple of our team with special dispensation from an Allied military and flew everything to

an allied nation, which is an unusual outing in the middle of COVID. So we have been probably actually extremely busy compared to normal thanks to all these opportunities. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus team. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave a review whatever you're listening to us. You can see more amazing insights into future technology on sciencefocus.com. we can also find the latest science news and stories. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly,

available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or port. signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at nameaio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals,

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