Name: 人類の夢「空飛ぶジェットスーツ」実用化への道のり | Obsessed | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-04-10T09:20:32.000Z
Duration: 7 min 34 s
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Basic passive voice

I'd be the first to admit that we went down this road, really at the beginning, for the pure joy of taking on a challenge that was largely thought to be impossible.

There was no textbook on how to go and do this.

I am founder and chief test pilot for Gravity, and we build 1,000-horsepower jet engine flying suits.

For the last few years, Browning and his team have tested every possible design and configuration they could come up with, all in an effort to make this a reality.

The origins of the concept were all around some of the inspiration from my early life.

I used to fly model gliders and model aircraft with my father.

His father was a pilot, so I guess it was in the blood.

But fulfilling his dream of flying required real physical demands, too.

I spent some time in the Royal Marines Reserve, and the time in the military and all the sports I pursued after that taught me a lot about the capability of the human mind and body.

I'm no great athlete, but I did learn a lot about how if you focus the human form on a challenge, whether you want to be an ice skater or a gymnast or whatever, it is amazing how this machine can be adapted.

I got to the point with this calisthenics bodyweight training where I could support my own weight in a number of different kind of unusual positions, like flags, for instance.

And I thought, well, if you just replace that hard structure that I'm holding onto with actually a form of thrust, I can hold my body in any number of different kind of fly positions.

So as ludicrous as that sounded, I thought, well, let's just go and experiment with it.

First, he needed to figure out how to stay suspended in the air.

The form of thrust I landed on was gas turbines.

Gas turbines are notorious for being very small form factors, extremely aggressive.

One gas turbine weighs five pounds and puts out about 50 pounds of thrust.

So in 2016, Browning started testing different components and variations.

And so having experimented with one, we went to two and then went to four, and it was getting increasingly compelling.

But things didn't always go quite so smoothly.

Through lots and lots of trial and error and constantly failing, to be honest, and learning all the time from those safe fails, we got to a point where we managed to achieve a flight.

And that was two engines on each arm and an engine on each leg.

But there were basic problems at every stage, starting with the decision to have engines on each leg.

There's a number of interesting challenges with that model.

The problems included the engines being only three or four inches off the ground in terms of the exhaust thrust, the violence of air coming out of those engines at about a thousand miles an hour and hitting even concrete.

You could see a smooth concrete surface would start to become pitted from the sheer violence of that air.

And yet, as you move them away, the violence of the velocity drops off.

There was also a challenge with having the engines on the legs in that if you happened to vector your arm engines anywhere near the intakes of the lower engine, we realized that your inducted air is going in, and that would then spike the exhaust temperature.

You could see a little puff of sparks and the engine would just shut down.

So that was another good reason for not having engines down there.

And finally, there's a strange human behavior we learned, which is that when your feet feel the ground has left them, they almost want to pedal and scrabble around looking for where that surface is.

That's not helpful when you've got 50 pounds of thrust coming off each leg.

And those problems led to the solution of actually moving those engines slowly up the body and then consolidating them into one.

And essentially that created a skirt all at the same altitude in the body, which can be likened to the three legs of a tripod.

There's thrust coming out of each arm and then essentially a third leg coming out of the back of your body, which provides that uncanny stability.

I can step you through what the components are.

Your arm goes inside that aluminum 3D printed tube.

You've got a micro gas turbine on each side, and you've got the same on the other side,  And around the back, and there's one more engine, which is roughly the power of these two together.

On the front here, you've got a lot of the electronic control systems and the batteries, which aren't plugged in here.

Those batteries actually run the starter motors and the glow plugs.

And then on the sides, you've got a couple of fuel bladders.

And the extra addition to it is a heads-up display system.

So inside there, you can see the lenses, which actually paint over my vision the fuel and engine data.

That data gets to the lenses via this little device that takes a wireless feed from the  It shows me everything to do with the engines and everything to do with the fuel to give me an idea as to how close we are to running out of fuel, for instance.

Last year, Browning set the world's speed record for a body-controlled jet suit, clocking in at 32 miles per hour.

He says the suit can actually fly much faster and higher than they've ever attempted.

That's because even at lower speeds and altitudes, there are still risks.

Jet fuel sounds scary, but it's the same kind of stuff as diesel.

It's actually not prone to forming vapor clouds.

In fact, you're really hard-pushed to even ignite it.

And even if it did burn in an uncontrolled way, you've certainly got probably 10, 15 seconds before it becomes a big fire.

Every single time we fly, we have fire extinguishers around the place.

In two years of doing this, we've never used a fire extinguisher.

So I'm not worried, but I have respect for the fire aspect of this.

But if you get a hairdryer and you press it against your head, you're going to burn your head.

Hold it like two feet away and it's cold.

The specific heat capacity of air is so poor that actually the heat dissipates really quickly.

And I've even swiped those engines across my leg with this, you know, heavy cotton flight trousers on.

All it did is just slightly singe the very top surface of the fabric.

So from a heat and fire point of view, it's really not a significant concern, but we manage it.

He's more concerned with falls and collisions.

If you gun that 80, 100 miles an hour around small twisty roads and come off that, it's going to hurt.

If I'm 10 feet above the ground and got an engine failure, I simply go downwards.

There is no scenario where our system can suddenly, in an uncontrolled way, gain height or shoot off to one side.

You simply drop, which is not a good thing.

But we've always got to allow for the potential for extremely unlikely mechanical failure of one of the engines.

That's why we keep the height fairly limited.

Speed wise, we can easily do 35 miles an hour, so we've gone quite a bit quicker in testing.

But again, for most of what we do, by the time you've done 35 miles an hour, you've gone a long way away from probably the audience or the area you're flying.

We push the limits a little bit more over water because that's a bit more forgiving if you fell in it.

So Browning's Jetsuit is no longer just a pipe dream.

They recently started custom designing and selling them, but at a price tag of about $440,000 a suit, it's safe to say it'll be out of reach for most.

As we improve the efficiency and the ease of use, then there is the potential for, I don't want to say mass transit straight away, but we have developed something that allows you to move human beings around in a completely unprecedented way.

One of the biggest challenges for bringing down cost?

Designing suits that are more fuel efficient.

This model currently burns about a gallon of fuel a minute.

That's one of the reasons they're working on an electric version and a set of wings that when deployed mid-flight would generate lift more efficiently.

They're also hoping some competition might spur innovation.

Throughout history, when two human beings have said, I think mine's faster than yours, that does push the envelope.

So next year, 2019, we are building out a race series for this.