Culture 3 min read

This new $450,000 Flight Suit Brings Iron Man to Life

Sarunyu L / Shutterstock.com

Sarunyu L / Shutterstock.com

This new 1050 horsepower human flight suit called Gravity is on sale now and is on the wishlist of adrenaline junkies and supervillains everywhere.

While other flight machines like the Flyboard leverage hover technology for flight, the Gravity flight suit is different.

Instead of channeling your inner Green Goblin, you can copy another classic Marvel character with this latest human flying suit.

Who is the man behind the flight suit and why does it cost around $445,000 USD?

Is This our World’s Iron Man Prototype?

While Marvel’s Iron Man might be busy saving the world from Thanos, Richard Browning launched Gravity in 2017. The company has now produced its first product.

It retails for £340,000 or around $445,500 USD and someone has already bought a suit.

The 3D printed suit uses five jet engines and special electronics to move the user. The kerosene microturbines propel the user through the air. The HUD uses the Sony SmartEyeglass Developer Edition to monitor fuel and engine status.

Using graphene and 3D printing, the materials keep costs down. Let’s be honest — I certainly never thought the first human flight suit would cost less than $1-million USD. Of course, it isn’t quite on the level of Iron Man just yet.

Overall Performance and Features

Though past tests showed the suit hovering a little above ground, the new suit can reportedly go up to 12,000 feet into the air. It weighs around 59 pounds and can move at speeds up to 32-miles per hour.

The suit does feature its own airbag system that auto-inflates upon impact. However, the suit also requires safety gear such as a helmet as you can see in the video above. You can even stream video live via the Wi-Fi data linkage.

Originally dubbed the “Daedalus Mark 1” according to Wikipedia, the new suit simply goes by “Gravity”. The company has hosted 45 flight demos across the world, as well as a couple of TED talks.

Competition for Elon Musk to Become the Illusive Man?

You know how much I love to shoe-horn in references to anything Mass Effect.

But prior to this accomplishment, Elon Musk had few competitors when it came to being the real “Tony Stark” or Mass Effect’s “Illusive Man“.

Despite Musk’s most recent outbursts, his companies SpaceX and the Boring Company stand at the forefront of futurizing our world. Even Tesla, with all of its production issues, is revolutionizing battery technology.

But Browning shows cleverness with how quickly and efficiently he developed this suit.

He used graphene as a building material to reduce the overall weight of the suit. He tested where best to position the jet engines tirelessly. But Browning may be an innovator only in the aeronautic field for now.

His family history is full of ex-pilots, aircraft makers, and engineers. In fact, he told CNN Travel that he initially started this as a fun experiment for potential cosplay.

We’ll just have to wait and see what extraordinary invention Browning will whip up next.

What improvements could be made to the current Gravity suit for better performance?

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Juliet Childers

Content Specialist and EDGY OG with a (mostly) healthy obsession with video games. She covers Industry buzz including VR/AR, content marketing, cybersecurity, AI, and many more.

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