Sussex man making electric jet suit that fly like Iron Man

Gravity Industries, a company that designs, builds and flies jet suits, has revealed its new battery powered suit that enables people to take to the sky.

It gets its power from batteries rather than jet propulsion, so alongside being better for the environment, electric power will offer other things that jet power cannot.

Electric power is more immediate, which means that the power is delivered quicker than with the normal jet engines, so the suit can start up faster.

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Sam Rogers from Cuckfield, who is a test pilot and design lead on the electric jet suit, said: "The suit is proving what you can do with modern batteries, when applied to a human flight suit."

He said the new product is not quite as good as their former jet suit yet, but it is greener and much more efficient.

"As batteries get better, so will the suit," he said.

Sam has helped Gravity Industries advance the suit by moving the manufacturing of the suits to be 3D printed.

Sam Rogers is helping to design a new electirc suit

3D printing is the process of making three dimensional solid objects from a digital file. The benefit of this means it is easier to make design improvements to the new suits.

The 25-year-old said: "3D printers are able to produce an entire suit structure after a day or so of printing, rather than having to manually fabricate the suit by hand.

"So with 3D printing, we design the suit as a virtual 3D model on a computer and then print it in one go."

The flight time is short for the current electric suit as it is the first prototype and the power is immense, equivalent to running 1,000 office fans at once.

There is no limit to the altitude that the suits can fly at, although the current test pilots fly at a relatively low altitude for safety reasons.

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Sam said: "The flight time on the jet suit is about six to eight minutes at the moment.

"You are able to traverse over any terrain by flight, over canyons, rivers, wetlands, boulder fields, and up mountains with ease.

"The suits are very intuitive to fly, more than an aeroplane which is not very instinctive. However, the suit is controlled by the movement of your arms.

"The cool thing about this is essentially we want to build a magic box that you can put on, and now you’re able to fly, we want to be able to stick this in front of anybody, and if they want, they are now able to fly."

Sam started working at Gravity Industries after meeting its founder and jet suit chief test pilot Richard Browning in Germany while working on rocket engines designed to send small satellites into space.

He has now flown the suit in New York, representing the UK alongside the Intrepid Aircraft Carrier and for commercial launching the new GoPro.

He has also flown alongside a 'Back to the Future' DeLorean and met one of his heroes, American tv presenter Adam Savage, when they kitted up the jet suit to look like the superhero Iron Man for one of his recent Discovery shows.

The new suit was shown off earlier this month at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.

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