The Real-Life Iron Man: Inventor Richard Browning Flies In His Jet-Powered Suit
When Marvel Comics released the first Iron Man movie in 2008, Tony Stark's high-tech flying armoured suit inspired a British innovator to come up with something similar. After a year of tinkering Gravity, a human propulsion technology startup, is launching the Daedalus flight suit. Reimagining human flight, Gravity uses the body as the airframe, allowing arms and legs to control and direct thrust. In short the Daedalus flight suit allows anyone to fly.
One day in early summer last year, Richard Browning headed to his farmyard in the English countryside. He attached a kerosene-fuelled micro gas turbine – effectively a small version of a plane engine – to each of his arms and legs.
To hover, Browning starts his engines before directing his movement with small, precise shifts of his body. The two turbines on his back are splayed out to provide balance; the two on each arm angle forward. Pointing down creates what Browning calls “a teepee of thrust vectors,” pushing him away from the ground. Shifting his arms back sends him forward; flaring his arms out pushes him down. If he wants more speed, he pulls his arms in and pushes his chest out.
One day in early summer last year, Richard Browning headed to his farmyard in the English countryside. He attached a kerosene-fuelled micro gas turbine – effectively a small version of a plane engine – to each of his arms and legs.
Then he carefully pressed the throttle trigger in his right hand. For months Browning had been working on this secret project. Now the moment of truth had arrived. In the modest surroundings of the UK countryside, "Wiltshire's Iron Man" took to the sky. Sort of.
Browning's first lift-off was short and clumsy. For a few seconds, he hovered half a metre off the ground, landing with a skidding stop as clouds of dust blew up around him. But it was, unmistakably, flight. “That was the very first moment we properly proved this would work,” he says. “That was it. You could get away with it.”
Two and a half years ago, 38-year-old Browning decided he wanted to fly. Human-powered flight was, he knew, "a very eccentric realm." Nonetheless, it fascinated him. He tried gliding with wings and electric fan motors, working weekends and evenings until his wife begged him to stop. Then he had an epiphany - what if he strapped a jet engine to his body and built a real-life version of Tony Stark's iconic suit?
Nine months since his inaugural test flight and Browning’s intuition has paid off. His suit is a light exoskeleton attached to six gas turbines with a combined thrust of 130 kilograms. His feet are covered by ultra-light snake-bite resistant walking boots imported from the US. And his flights, from a few seconds, now last as long as twelve minutes.
“We're a long way away at the moment,” Browning tells WIRED. “But one day you’ll literally be able to walk around in your garden, take off, fly about, then come down low and land.”
To hover, Browning starts his engines before directing his movement with small, precise shifts of his body. The two turbines on his back are splayed out to provide balance; the two on each arm angle forward. Pointing down creates what Browning calls “a teepee of thrust vectors,” pushing him away from the ground. Shifting his arms back sends him forward; flaring his arms out pushes him down. If he wants more speed, he pulls his arms in and pushes his chest out.
“The way you have to balance is pretty much the same stance Tony Stark has in the film,” Browning says. “When [Stark] first builds this thing in his lab, he goes crashing around bashing into his cars. The animators who did all that in CGI obviously did some pretty big thinking. It was kind of a funny moment when we realised we should have just watched the film and done that homework.”
The suit, which Browning estimates cost around £40,000 to develop (“I'm pretty good at blagging cheap stuff”), can travel at a speed of up to 450 kilometres an hour, although Browning hasn’t tested it to anywhere near full capacity. “If I put my arms down at my side, I’ll accelerate very fast and go straight up in the air. But I wouldn't do that because I didn't have a parachute.”
The suit is constantly improving. The latest addition: a heads-up display, supplied by Sony. Working with a company that had created augmented reality swimming goggles, Browning has developed a holographic lens “genuinely like a heads-up display fighter system.” With this in place, he'll be able to monitor his fuel levels; without the display he has to ask his wife or his father-in-law to squeeze the fuel tanks “and judge by their facial expression" how much petrol he has left. He’s full of plans for future enhancements: automated balancing systems; 3D-printed titanium arm mounts; flexible LCD screens “so it will go invisible at the touch of a button.”
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