“I was driven by a slightly irrational excitement for the journey,” he says. I was completely exhausted and thinking, what am I doing?” Still, with each failure, there was progress. “A little pop and a flash and a bit of smoke, and something would have shorted. Every breakage required sending it back to the German manufacturer for refurbishment. The engines were temperamental, and expensive. He frequently fell, and when he tried using a safety harness he found himself being thrown around like a marionette.
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Browning couldn’t stay aloft, managing only a series of elongated bounds. The early tests were a string of failures. While his children played, Browning attempted to fly. At weekends, Browning would drag his family out to the farmyard to test it.
“Nobody thought that it would work,” he says. At first, he kept the idea mostly to himself. The fuel bladder he hid inside a rucksack, secured with a climbing harness. One engine became two, then four, then six: two attached to each arm mount, and one strapped around each ankle. Every night, he would wake up at 1am, work for three or four hours on the suit in a spare bedroom, and then sleep on the train commute into London.
Over the following months, Browning’s jet suit became an obsession. He worried that the torque from the engines would twist his arm off, but “it was just a spongy push, like a firehose of water.” Soon he was standing in a country lane with what looked like a supercharged leaf blower on one arm, attached to a fuel tank in a mop bucket. Encouraged, he built an aluminium arm housing, and repurposed the trigger from a power drill as a throttle. “My god, the noise was unbelievable,” he says. But he still remembers his first lift-off: it was November 2016, on a farmyard a few minutes from his house in Salisbury.īrowning fired up the engine as soon as it arrived. Since launching Gravity three years ago, Browning has taken off thousands of times, performed live demonstrations in more than 30 countries, set a Guinness World Record (twice) and accrued more than ten million YouTube views for his exploits. (Its slogan: “we build 1,000 horsepower jet suits.”) He is also the company’s main designer and chief test pilot. Browning, who is 41, brown-haired and bearded, with the lean physique of an endurance athlete, is the founder and CEO of the jetpack startup Gravity Industries. “It’s indescribable, in an overwhelming, visceral kind of way,” Richard Browning says. Human beings have long dreamed of flying outside the confines of an aircraft, but without lift-off, existing means – parachutes, hang gliders, wing suits – are really elegant ways of extending a fall. It’s that moment, lift-off, that has given jetpacks an enduring appeal for over a century. Millions of years of evolution are overcome in an instant, two dimensions become three. Then suddenly, thrust exceeds weight, and – they’re aloft. It’s as if the vestibular system can’t quite believe what’s happening. The lumbrical muscles in the feet tighten, toes grasp desperately at the earth. The first time someone flies a jetpack, a curious thing happens: just as their body leaves the ground, their legs start to flail.
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