Learning to Fly Like IRON MAN

Hey guys I'm the Hacksmith, my team and I take fictional ideas from comics, movies and video games and make real working prototypes in our YouTube series Make It Real. You've probably seen some of our projects before like our electromagnetic Captain America shield, Zarya's particle cannon from Overwatch, a real-life lightsaber, different Thor's hammers, Cap's new Wakandan shield and even Thor's new weapon Stormbreaker. Normally with our projects we show the build process and finish with an epic test video where we truly see what the project can do. Today we're doing something different, I've got a big surprise to share. It's something almost all of you have been waiting to see. It might even be the reason why you subscribed and it's actually a bittersweet moment for me because today I'm finally going to be learning how to fly like Iron Man. We're on our way to a special private event hosted by Gravity Industries. If you haven't heard of them Gravity was founded by Richard Browning, a true real-life Tony Stark. He's done events all around the world and inspired people everywhere he's been. Over the past three years Richard has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing his patented 1,000 horsepower jet suit that allows him to fly just like Iron Man. He even has a lab in England with an entire wall of prototype suits and robotic systems just like Tony Stark. While Richard was in his lab developing his prototypes in secret halfway around the world my team and I had also started working on a flight project that we called Flying Like Iron Man. Our project began as a stunt we promised for our 100,000 subscriber milestone. If we crack 100,000 subscribers we should try and recreate this scene from Iron Man. But let's be honest it's probably gonna look more like this. So please don't subscribe. Needless to say we blew past 100,000 subscribers and had to make good on our promise. So we strapped model rockets to my wrist to see if I could hover for a few seconds. For what we knew was a very very very stupid idea we still had a lot of fun with it and so did the audience. Flying Like Iron Man became one of our most successful video series at the time and people wanted more. Needless to say rockets were not the answer. Between being a serious safety hazard of burning or even detonation, the high cost, and issues igniting them simultaneously, if we were going to continue Flying Like Iron Man we needed something different. That's when we started experimenting with electric ducted fans or EDFs for short. Using two wrist-mounted EDFs and a counterweight pulley system I was able to perform an assisted hover. Next we added boot EDFs but the problem was to get enough thrust we would need more than 20 EDFs which wouldn't really fit on my body. So we found the largest EDFs commercially available. 10 of which would be powerful enough to lift a person but they were even more expensive. So we turned to our fans for help and you guys helped raise enough money to purchase one of these giant EDFs to test. We even tried making one of our own EDFs to keep costs down though that was easier said than done. We continued working on the design in the background investing tens of thousands of dollars We even toyed with using miniature jet engines to provide the majority of steady lift with EDFs only controlling the guidance. But we knew how expensive it would be to purchase all the components to make that possible. Potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. Something we just couldn't afford. Soon after Richard showed the world what he had been working on. We saw it and were awestruck. Richard had done the impossible. He was flying like Iron Man. Not only that we found out you can buy one of his suits for only four hundred forty thousand dollars. No no we didn't buy one. Though I would if I could. You may be wondering why I gathered you here today. Well I've got some good news. I bought the jet pack. The bad news is I had to sell the shop and you're all fired. Yeah I guess I have my reasons not to. Back at the shop we still had to make a decision. Should we pursue a project that someone else had already patented and risk spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to make it happen with no guarantee of success? Or should we direct our efforts and finances into other make it real projects and growing our business? That was two years ago when we had only just reached 1 million subscribers. Since then we've completed over 75 other make it real projects including several featuring our EDF and jet engine that we've purchased for flying like Iron Man. We've now grown to five times the size we were employ over a dozen people including students from local universities and high schools. And we're even better equipped to take on big projects like the aliens power loader and this new project that I'm super excited for. What's that project? But more on that later. Based on the feedback from our audience we know our videos have helped inspire the next generation of engineers to dream big and I'm confident that we made the right decision to grow the business instead of going broke doing something that's already been done. But because of that I never got to learn how to fly like Iron Man until now. It might be obvious this is becoming a gradually more and more of an exercise of just seeing what we can do so. All right you're doing it you're living out every little kid's dream of flying like Iron Man. So how does it feel when you take off like you're literally flying without a vehicle? It's impossible to put it into words but it is almost like that dream that people have about flying. You genuinely have a three-dimensional freedom where you can just go wherever you think. A bicycle you don't steer it you just think where you're going to go. Same with this in three dimensions. It's truly insane. The really weird sensation is that it's quite gentle. It's just this gentle spongy push almost like holding a fire hose of water. All right so why don't you walk us through the suit and just how does it actually work? It's five jet engines little gas turbines. You've got two on each arm and then you've got one around the back and between that those clusters of thrust that's what creates that kind of tripod or pyramid of thrust and the control is all down to really vectoring with your arms. Where do you point them? You point them down you go up point them out and then you go down again right? The fuel bladders in here they're basically like rubberized bags and then around the front you've got this kind of waistcoat of electronics. Inside the helmet there's a head-up display system which takes a wireless data feed from this box so I can see my fuel burn and flight time and engine status. So yeah I know it's pretty simple and I mean this is actually quite an old model now. We've now got a version which is almost entirely 3D printed and believe it or not in polymer. That's amazing. Can't wait to try. All right let's put it on. The shoulders. You close this around here. You put your right arm into there. If you latch that switch so press it in. Now let go of it. It latches and now you can see you know how these things work right? This is now baseload sort of PWM signal. Now if you were to and don't do it. If you pull the trigger in and hold it don't do it. That's sending an even greater PWM signal which is a signal for the engines to begin. Exactly right. So if you just pull it in that's the range of motion. Once I give them a little shake and say okay you're good I'll see the green lights on all the engines. This is what you'd see in your heads up usually. I'll walk away and then I'll give you the thumbs up and that trigger is live and you'll be able to play with it. But mainly just have a play with the throttle response and have a play with what happens as you sort of move around and see how that goes and then what we can do is shut it down and then step the power up from there. That's the plan. I feel like a cross between Top Gun and Iron Man. Yeah I think you'd really enjoy trying on the tether. Yeah. So what we're gonna do is go out there. I'll hold. I'll take some of the weight just to save your arms a bit and then you're gonna latch that kill switch. Pull the trigger. Hold it for about three or four seconds until I say that's fine. Then let go of it and then you know they start up and then once that's good I'll give them a shake okay and it's like okay you got it and I'll let go. So when I first start I'm holding them up like this? It's this position. If you think about it you're you've got thrust coming out of here and you've got thrust you want to put there and there in that big kind of stable pyramid sort of thing yeah. Now normally beginner pilots would use their tether system which is actually something you can do yourself if you check out gravity.co. There are links in the description below. Unfortunately for me they didn't have the tether system with them in California because it was just a private demonstration they were hosting but Richard trusted me enough to use a suit anyways just at a lower power level. Again it's very low power but it's enough for you to start feeling what would make sense as we put that power level up. This is gonna be very low and then we'll easily step it up so it's most uncomfortable when it's not flying. Right so kill switch latch it now pull the trigger in all the way and hold it. Now with the rear engine it's probably quite nice just to lean forward a little bit it'll just warm your ankles a bit otherwise yeah. It's pretty good right? Low power but you can feel it. Oh yeah. Your stability looked really good you can start to feel that kind of lateral stability yeah. When I finally like powered off the engine and you took my earmuffs off I'm like yeah super loud. It really felt like Ironman just like starting to like you bring the arms down and it's so cool like you do have the thrust control in the arm grips to change the power. Spool up time still like takes a few seconds to like react but just moving your arms down you go full power from here to here you're going up. It's so much more fine control than than playing with throttles. Yeah so generally when you're flying are you on just like full power? Squeeze it on. You want to tune it we're good at this so you take off at about here because then you're really stable and then you want to like accelerate you can do this and you can so vectoring is the kind of key to all this. Well he's messed around with EDF so there's a really good bit of natural learning around force. It's quite the feeling when the back engine kicked down and then my legs started getting hot and I got better lean over a bit. Your challenge this time is to is to just play with the trigger get that lateral stability get to the point where you're holding that trigger in all the way and you're hitting the maximums I've given you and go okay I've got this I could stay here for a while if I need to now just start bringing it down as you bring it down don't lose sight of you've still got to keep your stability as you know if it all goes a bit wrong just flare out again. That was really good I mean that's quite a risk of going in the air and like suddenly losing it and stumbling or whatever so that bodes really well if we have the tether or when you're on the tether then all you're doing is just increasing that power and then you just come down slower and slower and eventually you don't come down. That was really good that was great I just think if we if we overstep this too far you stumble a bit and you know it can all go wrong quite quick not because you're gonna fly and hit a wall or anything you just fall over that's all. So you can feel that was a bit more power than last time. It felt like I was just getting so close like when I brought it close it was like it's coming up. I mean just think about it that's about a hundred pounds of lift. That was awesome. That was that was brilliant the fact that you were able to get off the ground and actually still control the rotation and your lateral movement completely says that you've got that balance and control so that was brilliant that suggests you wouldn't take more than probably another four or five goes to kind of land that. That's awesome yeah because when you're telling me about it how like make sure you don't like get into a spin or something then I was like oh crap does that happen but then when I was doing it was just like yeah it felt fairly natural just holding my arms. It's very cushiony it's just like spongy yeah it's spongy when I brought the arms close together I could just like almost feel like my ankles coming up yeah it's like a bit more power I'd just be floating right here. Just need that tether system. That was amazing well thank you so much for letting me try the suit. No problem at all. I hope to see you soon again in the future. Absolutely definitely. That was incredible I can't even describe the feeling of having that much power coming off your own limbs. Apparently I showed real promise with the suit so I should be visiting gravity again very soon to learn how to fly the suit maybe even join the racing league. To anyone who might be disappointed that I didn't get to fly by myself this time ask yourself this would you let someone with no experience take out your five hundred thousand dollar Lamborghini for a rip? Richard put a lot of faith in my abilities to even let me try the suit without the tether system. If I had accidentally tripped it could have been tens of thousands of dollars in damages alone. Make sure you check out and subscribe to Gravity's YouTube channel and Instagram for more awesome videos on the Jetsuit and stay tuned for our next video where we interview Richard about the suit and give him the first piece he needs to become a real-life Ironman. Check on control surfaces ready and three two one