Two items on this show - John Greenwald - from The Black Vault - on why NASA and the UAP Task Force had a secret meeting - Plus a longer conversation with British inventor Richard Browning who has created a method for human flight - without a plane!
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| Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast. | |
| My name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained. | |
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| Always plans in the pipeline here as we come into the second half of 2021. | |
| We look towards the back end of this year and then, scarily enough, 2022. | |
| You know, 2022. | |
| Can you believe that? | |
| Now, what I want to do is put on this edition of The Unexplained a couple of things that were on my radio show so that they are preserved for posterity. | |
| First of all, we're going to speak with John Greenwald, the man from the Black Vault website, a very famous website that, of course, has been a front runner in all of the UAP and UFO stuff for a while. | |
| He's broken an awful lot of stories, and he's got one that appeared in the media here that I thought you'd want to know more about. | |
| Not in the mainstream media, but I saw this story and thought it needs amplification. | |
| So John Greenwald is going to do this. | |
| He ran a story essentially saying that America's UAP task force had itself a behind closed doors briefing session, a communications session, with NASA. | |
| And John Greenwald found that out via a freedom of information request. | |
| Now, that's interesting. | |
| Why would they do that? | |
| And why would they do that secretly? | |
| What is the connection between the UAP task force people and NASA? | |
| Is it to do with things that may have been seen around NASA launches or around the International Space Station? | |
| I don't know. | |
| But it's interesting to speculate and to find out. | |
| So John Greenwald will be speaking with here. | |
| Then after that, the story of a great British inventor, Richard Browning, based in Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK, with an amazing workshop, who's got a company that's built essentially a device that allows you to fly. | |
| It is amazing. | |
| If you've seen the James Bond film from years ago, where he has a contraption that he puts on and flies, this is something much more sophisticated than that, it seems, that allows you to essentially fly like a bird without using a plane or a device. | |
| So Richard Browning, British inventor in the old school, but very much up to date, also on this edition. | |
| So I hope you enjoy those things. | |
| Remember, if you want to communicate with me, you can always go to the website, theunexplained.tv, follow the link, and you can communicate with me from there. | |
| Actually, that's quite good. | |
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| All right, let's get to the first item on the show then. | |
| John Greenwald from the Black Vault in the U.S. I spoke with him. | |
| Actually, he did this conversation at 4.30 in the morning, California time, or U.S. time. | |
| Astonishing, that part of the U.S. anyway. | |
| Astonishing that he was up and his brain firing like a laser at that time in the morning. | |
| But this is John Greenwald, and we're discussing why NASA and the UAP Task Force had a behind-closed doors meeting. | |
| Can I start by asking you to explain to my listener, who probably knows because he or she is listening to this program, but in case they don't, the role that Black Vault is now playing? | |
| Because it seems to me that you've been very much, you know, spear carriers, torchbearers in this whole process that we're going through to do with UFOs this year. | |
| Well, I appreciate that. | |
| So what I feel the role is, is I'm just pushing for answers, whatever they may be. | |
| And I try and do it with no bias, with no objective other than just push, push, push and see what the U.S. government will give me. | |
| So whether that be through the press statements and the Pentagon and what they'll tell me there or fighting legally through what we have as the Freedom of Information Act and going after documents and videos and photos and going at it that way. | |
| So essentially, I tackle it two ways. | |
| I'm the only one that runs the site. | |
| It's a one-man operation. | |
| I'm the boss all the way down to the janitor. | |
| And whenever I can, I just push for those answers and see what I can get. | |
| So where do you think we are, before we get into the matter at hand, as they say, where do you think we are at the moment? | |
| We've had the interim report that was delivered in Washington a month or so ago. | |
| We're expecting more within three months or thereabouts. | |
| Where do you think we stand? | |
| Well, it's a little bit of a waiting game. | |
| Like you said, three months or so is going to be an update to Congress. | |
| What they issued was, although they call it the report, it was really less of a report than what they're used to getting when it comes to the intelligence community, meaning I expected something a little bit lengthier, and instead it was much, much smaller. | |
| So it's a bit of a waiting game on where we're going to be at this point. | |
| Are we going to get something bigger in 90 days? | |
| The assumption is that we're going to get something as the general public. | |
| I'm not convinced of that yet. | |
| Congress may get an update, but that doesn't mean it's going to be public. | |
| The only mandated public portion of this has already been given. | |
| So I hope I'm wrong on that, but I'm cautiously optimistic here that we'll get something, but the reality is we may not. | |
| So it's a bit of a waiting game. | |
| The ball is in the court of the government And the military. | |
| And I don't believe that that report gave adequate answers, not only to the general public, but the Congress. | |
| And so, what are they going to do next? | |
| What is that update going to entail? | |
| And will it be public? | |
| And that's the waiting game on where we're at, because they have maintained, and I believe there's ample evidence, a cover-up for 70 years, right? | |
| Nobody can deny that. | |
| There's a cover-up of something. | |
| Will they continue the cover-up? | |
| Well, if I was a betting man, I would say yes, but we will see in the next two to three months. | |
| We will. | |
| Do you believe, and I know that you have connections, are you hearing that we may get more revelations of the strength of the Tic-Tac UFOs, for example? | |
| Well, it's possible. | |
| I have an open legal case that's outside of the Freedom of Information Act. | |
| It is a part of our law that allows me to go after classified records. | |
| Whether or not I get them or not is a little bit of a question mark, but it looks promising. | |
| I will get at least some form of the classified version of this UAP report because there was two versions that were handed to Congress, obviously, the public one that we saw. | |
| But I was able to write a story last Friday and reveal that it was a 17-page report. | |
| And that was the classified version. | |
| Whether or not there's information on the Tic Tac in there and whether or not we will get additional information, that's a question mark. | |
| When it comes to the U.S. military now, outside of that report, trying to get information on it is very, very difficult because according to them, there kind of isn't much. | |
| They released the video. | |
| I've gone after other types of documents. | |
| One, we believe, is a PowerPoint presentation that remains classified. | |
| So am I hearing rumors that we'll hear more about it? | |
| I would say no. | |
| Will we ever? | |
| I'm not really sure. | |
| It seems like whatever happened out there, they want to keep a lid on it. | |
| So do you think in general, talking beyond the Tic Tacs, I mean, looking at the picture in the round, as they say, that in future, if we don't get what we should get from Washington, is it likely that we will have to depend increasingly on whistleblowers, people coming forward? | |
| It may be, but that adds an extra challenge to a lot of this, where who do we believe? | |
| You know, a lot of people like to come out and be that whistleblower, but what type of evidence are they going to bring with them? | |
| And if this is a classified topic, you may wind up with either an Edward Snowden situation and the person that's doing this is either going to go in hiding or be put in jail, or you're going to have a lot of hoaxers and you're going to have a lot of people that are literally just making it up as they go for the limelight and the spotlight. | |
| So I'm not a big fan of whistleblowers at all when it comes to this topic, simply because it is so challenging to figure out who is telling the truth and who would actually be potentially being honest. | |
| Which brings us to what I call the matter in hand and the reason that we're talking now. | |
| You've been able through Freedom of Information requests to discover that the Department of Defense, the DOD, its UAP task force, actually had a closed-door hyper-secret briefing session with NASA. | |
| And you quite rightly posed the question, why would that be? | |
| That's right. | |
| Yeah, that was a revelation that came a little over a week ago through the FOIA. | |
| And I was surprised because NASA is not mentioned in the report as having contributed. | |
| So that doesn't mean that the task force wouldn't talk to them, but what role did they play? | |
| And what was interesting was one of the four people that were scheduled to be in this classified briefing or secret briefing via the secure video teleconference that took place towards the end of 2020 was the program manager for the International Space Station. | |
| So why that is interesting is the fact that there's really kind of no reason for him to be there because the focus of the task force was military ranges and training ranges and essentially stuff closer to Earth. | |
| Now, the only conclusion that I can come up with, which I think is very logical to look at this, is that there's a lot of instrumentation on the ISS and quite possibly the task force wanted to gain access to that data. | |
| So that all makes sense. | |
| But the question mark for me is why would the DOD care about NASA's sensors and technology? | |
| Albeit I'm sure it's very advanced and albeit I'm sure it's very technologically sound. | |
| But the DOD, I would argue, has access to even more than that, more powerful instrumentation, better instrumentation, better data through their classified satellites and so on. | |
| So do they need NASA? | |
| And that's kind of an unwritten chapter in this that, you know, was it really just instrumentation? | |
| Because I'd argue the DOD has something better. | |
| Or was the task force and is the task force not only looking at those military ranges that we know of, but contacting NASA and going, okay, look, you guys have cameras pointed out there. | |
| Are you capturing these objects? | |
| And we know the answer is yes, whether it's alien or not, we don't know. | |
| But in my article, I link to quite a few of the more reputable ones, the ones that aren't, I would say, easily dismissed, but rather cameras that are on the ISS that have captured objects in their frame that lack explanation. | |
| And so is that why the task force reached out to them? | |
| And we don't have an answer to that yet. | |
| Isn't that interesting, John, because every time, certainly this side of the Atlantic, and these reports, as you know, appear in the press all the time here of weird objects spotted adjacent to the International Space Station from NASA footage, here it is, and there's this strange thing that appears somewhere close to the International Space Station. | |
| Usually these things are brushed off as no big deal. | |
| But when you consider that that meeting was attended by the person Responsible for the International Space Station, then I think you have every right to be asking questions here. | |
| That's right. | |
| And it should be noted: I did push for an answer to that. | |
| Why was he involved? | |
| And according to the Pentagon, who spoke on behalf of all the agencies that I contacted, they won't say. | |
| They say they will not reveal any of the contents of the classified briefing, which told me it was classified. | |
| That was actually one of my questions to them, you know, because there is a difference between just kind of a briefing and a classified briefing. | |
| NASA generally doesn't deal in classified matters, and they responded, calling it a classified briefing, that they would not reveal any of the contents and essentially not answer any of my questions. | |
| They did allude to the fact that the space station does have this instrumentation and technology that could potentially be used, but that just could be a smokescreen. | |
| Because if they are looking at these other sightings, as you referenced, that are taking place, and there's quite a few of them now, that's a pretty interesting revelation because to the general public, they are saying the task force very much just focuses on military ranges and essentially military encounters, and that's it. | |
| And if you're doing a scientific investigation, why would you limit that? | |
| You know, I mean, I understand if they're underfunded and understaffed, but why would you limit it when it comes to looking at a phenomena, whatever it may be, and just say, okay, we're only going to deal with stuff that affects us? | |
| Well, no, you need to look at it as a whole. | |
| So it would make sense that they would go to NASA and say, okay, you're capturing this phenomena out your windows. | |
| We want access to that. | |
| Did that happen in that way? | |
| Well, again, that's an unwritten chapter, but it sure makes for some fun thoughts about it all. | |
| It does. | |
| And in the meantime, of course, NASA, astonishingly enough, I think about a month ago, revealed that it was going to be investigating separately the UFO-UAP phenomenon. | |
| So all of this, very tenuously at the moment, kind of ties together. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| And in fact, that was my motivation when I saw that press conference. | |
| There was one in particular with Bill Nelson and Dr. Z, as they refer to him. | |
| And it was Dr. Z's emails that came up in this Freedom of Information Act request that revealed this briefing. | |
| And it was a little bit of, just to kind of quickly summarize the story, it was kind of a little bit of a case of good luck that I came across this because Dr. Z was not involved in the briefing on either side. | |
| He just received this email, and that's where I came up with it. | |
| So it's amazing what you can find when you start pushing for answers and continue to ask questions and you get these documents. | |
| You never know what you'll stumble upon. | |
| And this was quite a revelation in my book. | |
| John, thank you for giving me time. | |
| We will talk again. | |
| Anytime. | |
| It was an absolute pleasure. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| John Greenwald, the man behind the Black Vault website, he has had a number of pioneering pieces on that site. | |
| An amazing man. | |
| We will speak with him longer in the future. | |
| He actually recorded that conversation with me at 4.30 in the morning last Friday, 4.30 a.m. | |
| Boy, I wish my brain was that fast at that time in the morning, but amazing guy. | |
| So we'll hear more from him. | |
| Now settle back and enjoy the story of a great British inventor and his great British invention. | |
| Richard Browning has devised a way that you can fly like a bird using jetpack power. | |
| It is an astonishing story. | |
| It's been made into a new book and the book I heartily recommend. | |
| He is a guy who is learning to defy gravity. | |
| In a way that I suspect man has always looked to the skies and seen the birds cavort up there and wished that he or she could do that. | |
| We're getting nearer to being able to do it, it seems, thanks to Richard Browning. | |
| So, without further ado, as they say, here is that conversation with Richard Browning. | |
| Richard Browning is a British inventor, a man who, like all inventors, had a dream. | |
| The dream was to fly. | |
| Now, most inventors who have a bit of technical knowledge and they want to fly will devise themselves along the lines of the Wright brothers a flying machine. | |
| And they will do so with varying degrees of success. | |
| History shows us that mostly the success quotient is on the negative level, and they fail, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes giving their own lives in the process. | |
| Richard is very different. | |
| A very methodical guy with the dream of flight, but personal flight. | |
| You might have seen that old James Bond movie some years ago where James Bond appeared to fly. | |
| I think it was Thunderball. | |
| I was captivated by that. | |
| It was always shown on the TV when I was a kid. | |
| And I suspect Richard Browning's dream was something very similar. | |
| But let's get to him now. | |
| He's in his workshop in Salisbury, which is festooned with bits of kit and various other pieces of technical apparatus. | |
| Richard Browning, thank you for coming on. | |
| Hi, yeah, my pleasure. | |
| And the way that I described you there, British inventor, do you like that tag? | |
| You know, these days the media has to tag everybody, but does that work for you? | |
| Yeah, gosh, I mean, there's been a lot of different tags in the last four or five years since we've been live with the company Gravity. | |
| Yeah, I think that's okay. | |
| It is funny, though, isn't it? | |
| I think the hesitance in my voice and maybe the reasoning for your question is that we have this awful habit in the UK, particularly, of associating that title with some degree of unconstructive eccentricity, which I think is a shame. | |
| But yes, I mean, I think inventor is certainly one reasonable title. | |
| But to do what you are doing and have done, you know, you don't have to think like everybody else. | |
| You have to be faintly eccentric. | |
| And I mean that in terms of thinking out of the box. | |
| Yeah, no, definitely. | |
| And I think you're very right. | |
| I think every entrepreneur, every inventor, every creator, by definition, has to piece together a thought process that somebody hasn't done before in exactly the same way. | |
| And that was very much a part of how I arrived at what we've gone and done with gravity and building the jetsuit, very much. | |
| And you've written a great and very different book about this and we'll explain why that book is different. | |
| Why did you feel at this stage the need to chronicle what you've been doing? | |
| Well, so the pleasing answer, rather than sounding very self-pratuciated, the pleasing answer is actually we were asked to. | |
| So I mean, I can give you the kind of plotted history as to where this all came from, but in summary, that story is really quite unusual and pretty colorful. | |
| And I think that was recognized. | |
| I think I've done five TED Talks now and keynotes all over the world. | |
| And I think that had been picked up by the publishers and they actually asked us. | |
| I think that's always the nice way around. | |
| And we'll get into this a little later, like everything else in this world. | |
| To a greater or lesser extent, COVID has got in the way in the last year. | |
| Yes, although, you know, you wouldn't be surprised to hear that from an engineering perspective, we are constantly experimenting and testing and trying things and failing a lot in a safe way. | |
| What we tend to do is apply the same ethos that actually I learned as an oil trader. | |
| I spent 16 years with BP as an oil trader and that was all about running a trading book where you do fail sometimes with trading decisions, in fact, quite often, but you just have to make more money out of the successes than you lose in the failures. | |
| And actually, we apply the same methodology to the commercial side of the business. | |
| And so I'm actually really quite proud that because we've got that big portfolio of quite diverse activity in the business, we've actually ended up adapting and swapping things around and prospering as best as we could, despite losing all the commercial events we used to do around the world. | |
| I mean, we clocked up 120 and 34 separate countries before COVID came along because of how portable this equipment is and how much demand there is around the world to see it. | |
| And all of that sort of stopped in an instant, but we've switched fire to all our military search and rescue, a more aggressive R ⁇ D program and loads of media, social media and filming work and actually done really quite well. | |
| Just listening to you, but reading the book particularly, you come across as a very determined guy, and I can understand why that might be. | |
| Now, the way I want to do this conversation, if this is okay with you, Richard, is I want to talk about you first and then the dawnings of your ideas for this project and why somebody, you know, who worked at BP decided that he wanted to do this. | |
| Then in the second segment, I thought we would talk about the way that you developed this. | |
| And then in the third segment, you know, the practical emergence of it and what you've been doing with it and what you want to do with it. | |
| So if that works for you, should we do it that way? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Yep. | |
| That sounds great. | |
| All right. | |
| Now, we're talking with Richard Browning. | |
| He has created a way of personally flying, effectively a flying suit. | |
| You know, it's one of those things where critics would say it cannot be done, but he's done it. | |
| And you will be reading, if you haven't read about him already, much more about him. | |
| Talk to me about you then, Richard. | |
| Were you a little boy who was, you know, obsessed by flight and TV programs that were to do with flight and science and, you know, exploration, stuff like that? | |
| Not so much, really. | |
| I definitely wasn't one of those kids that collected action figures and, you know, sort of, I suppose, obsessed over comic book characters and things like that. | |
| No, I was far more likely to be found in my dad's workshop, you know, drilling holes and bits of aluminium and taking old TV sets apart and kind of making and creating things and breaking things. | |
| But particularly around also, because my late father was an aeronautical engineer, you know, I shared his passion for, I think, aviation. | |
| And I remember as a kid making little balsa wood aircraft, initially, you know, ones with that, was it tissue paper and dope you used to use? | |
| And it sounds ridiculous now when I look at my kids and what they find entertaining. | |
| And I look at what I used to find entertaining, you know, pinning bits of balsa wood to a board and gluing them together and then covering them in tissue paper with the culmination of throwing this little contraption across the garden and probably finding even after you've trimmed it out, it only going about sort of 20 meters. | |
| I can't believe that. | |
| You know, that was hours of work. | |
| And that was considered entertainment back. | |
| Well, it was, and kids don't do that now. | |
| I think they've got far more technical things to pursue, which is a shame, I think. | |
| But, you know, if there's, from my recollection of the balsa wood planes, and I made a lot of them too, I loved all of that. | |
| I used to make them, but they would be terribly unsuccessful and really disappointing because they wouldn't go nearly as far, as you said, as you wanted them to. | |
| What I'm getting around to saying really is that if anything is more guaranteed to put you off being interested in flight, the little balsa wood planes and all of those things, I think would be guaranteed to do that. | |
| Yeah, I think what probably helped a bit was that as I got older, still as a kid, I remember progressing onto these very basic little two-channel radio control gliders, the kind you throw off a hill and then you could steer it around. | |
| That was an enormous leap because suddenly you could avoid the thing just nosediving into the ground, at least some of the time. | |
| And I think standing on a hill, you know, in the beautiful British countryside on a summer's day and just watching this little creation of yours effortlessly float around for as long as, you know, the battery or the control system would last. | |
| I think in hindsight, that must have had a big kind of impact on me. | |
| And as I say, my father was an aeronautical engineer. | |
| His father was a wartime pilot and civil pilot after that. | |
| And my other grandfather was Sir Basil Blackwell, who used to be chairman, chief executive of Western helicopters back in the day. | |
| So I think, you know, the passion for seeing a problem, engineering a solution, and especially if it was one involved in aviation or taking to the skies, you know, I think that was definitely buried deep inside my mind somewhere. | |
| And that's a big part of the rationale of, you know, why I went on to do what I've done. | |
| Any man who says that he is not enormously influenced by his father, I would ask him to think again and look back over his life, because I think most of us, even if we don't realize it at the time, we are. | |
| Your father was massively important to you, not only because of what he did, but also because of the trajectory, if you want to put it that way, of his life. | |
| That influenced you too. | |
| Yeah, very much. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, he was a sort of good corporate employee on the engineering side of things and then took that leap to set up his own business. | |
| It was particularly around pioneering mountain bike suspension, as it happens. | |
| That was a new thing back then. | |
| But he ended up teaching me a very powerful lesson, really, which is that those people listening that have set up their own businesses and gone down any particularly challenging pathway, they'll realize that just having the idea and even engineering a perfectly good solution to that idea in this case is sadly only probably 10% of the challenge. | |
| The other 90% is all the misery, if I may put it that way, of trying to commercially set up, you know, the right product, branded in the right way with the right partners, distributed and manufactured, et cetera, all of these other kind of elements. | |
| And yeah, ultimately, I watched as a young teenager him struggle in a very challenging wider business environment and be ripped off by some other partners. | |
| And he just sadly, inadvertently taught me all these lessons about how you have to work extremely hard to try and avoid all these pitfalls. | |
| And it ultimately ended with him taking his own life when I was 15. | |
| So I think I've taken what minimal positives there are from that experience. | |
| And I mean, it served me very well. | |
| Like I say, when I used to run a trading book or even setting up several startups, including Gravity. | |
| And that is, yes, take risk. | |
| Yes, try something new. | |
| Yes, venture down that pathway that no one's been down before, but sure as hell, cover off and make survivable in every sense the worst case scenarios. | |
| You know, in our case, flying jetsuits, you know, it's why we don't fly particularly high and it's why we analyze rigorously, rigorously as we can, you know, what is the worst that can happen at every stage. | |
| But we also do that from a financial and reputational perspective as well. | |
| So, you know, it was a terrible tragedy. | |
| But as I say, I think I've tried to pick up those pieces and to some degree, fulfill a lot of unfulfilled ambition that I felt around me during that time in what we've gone and done with this company. | |
| An awful thing to go through at 15. | |
| And, you know, that's an age when a boy needs his dad. | |
| So for you to have the fortitude to come through that, do you feel that you're doing this for your dad? | |
| Yeah, not in a sort of front of brain sense, not like, you know, it's not a practical objective, but sort of emotionally and spiritually, massively, because I just feel like he was obsessed with and had a wonderful childlike joy around anything to do with engineering, building, you know, and constructing, and especially if it was new. | |
| I remember sitting around the dinner table with him talking about how we were going to design and build our own little, you know, single-seat aircraft, you know, that we could probably just about build ourselves. | |
| And, you know, he had that childlike kind of glee. | |
| So I think there are a few things that would have inspired him and excited him more than kind of what we've gone on and done. | |
| But as I say, it's a funny one because all of these thoughts have only really manifest through the medium of several hundred, if not thousand interviews, I think, in the last five years. | |
| And it's a very interesting process because you hear yourself answering the questions and then little lights come on and you go, oh, okay, maybe that was what was going through my mind and was why I've ended up going down the pathway I've ended up going down. | |
| I mean, it's part of the reason. | |
| I mean, a large part was to do with my time with the Royal Marines as well. | |
| But certainly my father's influence is huge in this, I think. | |
| After the Royal Marines, though, you didn't automatically, I don't think, become an inventor, did you? | |
| You spent some time in one of this country's blue chip companies. | |
| Well, yeah, so I mean, just to plot the trajectory. | |
| So yeah, I went to university. | |
| I studied actually, of all things, an exploration geology degree, but I had a place at Sandhurst to join the army. | |
| Changed my mind a bit whilst I was at university. | |
| I frankly spent so much time with the Officer Training Corps doing military things. | |
| I started to grow an intrigue as to what it might be like in the corporate world. | |
| I did an undergrad placement with BP, discovered oil trading, which was a bunch of very young people making exciting decisions and earning some really good money, doing really kind of fast-paced international business. | |
| And it just really, you know, excited me. | |
| I think it was an outlet for my entrepreneurialism, but very much not physical. | |
| It was very much a sort of commercial entrepreneurialism. | |
| Anyway, so I got sort of sucked into that world. | |
| In parallel with that, I spent six years in the Royal Marines Reserve as a way of scratching that kind of military self-challenge itch, you know, self-challenge desire that wasn't being fulfilled having not gone to Sandhurst. | |
| But I'm very proud I got my Green Beret alongside my 16 years with BP. | |
| And it was a huge part, I think, of the inspiration behind believing that you could get a human being to do what we now do. | |
| I mean, it's now very easy. | |
| We've trained over 400 people to do this. | |
| But the original belief that you could control and balance and coordinate on paper over a thousand horsepower of jet engines, I think came from the self-confidence that the Royal Marines had taught me around just how you can train your mind and body to do things that on paper you don't really think are that feasible. | |
| So how did the germ of the idea, I am going to build a flying suit, how did that come to you, all of a sudden or over a period? | |
| Yeah, I mean, it was more just the latest and a long line of, okay, not usually quite as unusual, but you know, latest long line of self-challenges. | |
| I mean, I was constantly, whether it was in my day job or outside of my day job, just constantly curious about challenges. | |
| I mean, I took up ultra-marathon running because I thought, hang on, how can anybody run 100 miles? | |
| That sounds mad. | |
| So I thought, you know, I spent three or four years just gradually building up and ended up running those kind of length races just because, you know, I love looking at something and thinking, surely that can't be done or surely I couldn't get to that point. | |
| And then, you know, most of the time I'm probably right. | |
| But every now and then it's rewarding enough to get yourself over that line. | |
| You know, the Royal Marines was a bit of that, if I'm honest. | |
| And I, you know, I'd had a great success in BP. | |
| I discovered something in the trading world that turned a frankly mad sounding idea around tracking ship trade flows that made a huge amount of money for BP out of about a $20,000 investment that no one really understood what I was doing. | |
| And I love those journeys when you take something, I suppose I'm slightly addicted to them, you take something that people around you say can't be done. | |
| It is so exciting when you then, despite all the odds and all the setbacks, just get that idea over the line. | |
| And I think that is a big part linked to my father's experience because I didn't see that happen. | |
| So I think, you know, some sort of Freudian process in my head, if I can get enough of those infeasible journeys over the line, then it'll all be, you know, it'll all be made good. | |
| I mean, maybe that's what's going on. | |
| It served me quite well so far. | |
| But no, the flight idea, it was this strange amalgamation of this subconscious association with my family background, I think, and passion for flight and looking up. | |
| It is the mother of all, you know, I suppose metaphors for ambition, isn't it? | |
| Looking up and looking at the birds and thinking, why can't I sort of join them and be that free? | |
| But also this fascination With could you approach flight in a very different way? | |
| Could you not just employ the brain much more intimately with the balance challenge and the body much more intimately with the flight structure challenge? | |
| You know, I wanted to move away from having a seat in a control system, you know, press go, and the structure takes you there. | |
| I wanted to get as close as possible to it being you physically flying. | |
| Almost like a bicycle is an amazing augmentation to the human mind and body with the minimalist, you know, steel or aluminium and rubber. | |
| And look what it can do to you, or for you, rather. | |
| And history shows what happens if you look at things from the other perspective, where you try and create something that is a construct around a human being. | |
| Quite often that doesn't work. | |
| And that was something that comes out of your book, the fact that you wanted to amalgamate this with us, with the way that our limbs work, with the way that our minds work. | |
| You didn't want to separate it because you felt that would be the way to make this succeed. | |
| Yeah, I think there's, I mean, everybody, you know, I'm sure everybody would appreciate that there's this constant push now with, you know, just put the human in a box with a big red, green, or sorry, big green go button. | |
| And, you know, you're just a passenger, right? | |
| You know, because the computers are doing it and because the gyros are controlling you and because the flight structure is carrying you, you know, and there's definitely a place for that. | |
| I mean, you know, the majority of aviation needs that and that's great. | |
| But there's something very inspiring and exciting when you distill that right back to the minimalist addition to the human body that you require. | |
| And, you know, the obvious thing we're missing, unlike birds, is the muscular power in the right place to be able to propel ourselves into the air. | |
| We've got more than enough balance. | |
| The fact you can learn to ski or snowboard or roll a blade or all these ludicrously unbalanced things, and the fact we can run around, you know, on uneven surfaces, momentarily touching that surface with each footstrike, when you really stop and think about it, is a phenomenal balance achievement. | |
| So balance, I had a very strong suspicion we could adapt our own balance very quickly. | |
| We were flying, you know, we're doing client flight training yesterday at Goodwood and I had two clients that were by no means gymnasts. | |
| They were in their 50s and they got it within a morning and with our safety tether system. | |
| Yes, the latest example of that theory being, I think, pretty correct. | |
| And then when it comes to strength, humans are pretty strong and light. | |
| And therefore, I have this hunch that if you attach the propulsion, didn't have any idea what that would look like when I started, but if you attach the propulsion in the right places, then again, the human structure would be able to accept that in a really organic, natural way. | |
| And that was the challenge, really. | |
| Right. | |
| That takes us into the second part of our conversation then. | |
| Richard Browning, a man with a plan, a man who it certainly sounds like will not take no for an answer. | |
| Very positive attitude, and that's what gets you results. | |
| We're talking about his invention that is pretty damn unique and is going to be making some huge headlines very soon. | |
| A flying suit. | |
| Something that actually attaches to you and allows you to do what the birds do. | |
| It's an astonishing thing. | |
| So, Richard, there you are working for BP, making money for and with them. | |
| How did you come to make the transition to living this dream? | |
| Yeah, so I started experimenting with various ideas, but all of it in my kind of free time evenings and weekends. | |
| And that was quite tough because I used to start my day at about 5 a.m. with a very long commute involving cycling and trains and all sorts to get into London. | |
| But I still took every opportunity I could to try and experiment with ideas. | |
| I had a whole bunch of sketchbooks that I used to just, whenever I was traveling with work, used to just fill with various ideas. | |
| But it got to the point where I needed to do what we nowadays are very passionate about, which is to get, you know, get my hands dirty with an idea, with a prototype and actually start learning from properly trying something. | |
| And that involved taking the plunge, trying to understand where I could get hold of a small form, very powerful form of propulsion. | |
| And I very quickly arrived at the conclusion that was a little jet engine. | |
| I had an idea. | |
| I mean, as a kid, I understood pretty much the basics of how jet engines work from my family background. | |
| But I had an idea that the technology of the little ones that you can get on very large model aircraft or military gun target drones or reconnaissance drones and things like that. | |
| I had an idea that the technology of those had advanced quite a long way. | |
| But it did take quite a bit of time to sort of get my head around them and understand how they work and get hold of one. | |
| But the sort of pivotal moment was around March 2016, where I got hold of one. | |
| I'd run it enough times on a test rig to understand how it worked, how to shut it down and how to control the thrust. | |
| And I got to the point where I built an arm sort of test assembly. | |
| If you imagine a kind of aluminium structure I was holding on one arm and I had the engine on the arm and very gingerly started, you know, a very low power level and built up from there. | |
| And that was a massive moment because to my utter surprise, although in hindsight, it shouldn't have been a surprise, the sensation of the thrust was just this very gentle, spongy push, almost like you'd feel holding a fire hose of water. | |
| And actually, the physics is very similar. | |
| So that was a huge moment because it dawned on me that if it was that gentle and simple, that it's just a question of adding more and adding more in the right place. | |
| But control being the thing. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| I mean, you know, at every stage, you know, every stage, it was about analyzing kind of what is the worst that could happen. | |
| So you'd make sure you absolutely shut these things down if you had a problem and absolutely make sure that even at the highest throttle level, you weren't going to be thrown to one side or anything like that. | |
| But actually, having covered all that off, it was an amazing moment. | |
| It was, I mean, they're extremely noisy. | |
| You know, there's about six different reasons why the sort of conventional received wisdom would suggest that all of this isn't going to be possible. | |
| One of my favorite is the assumption, and I've had very learned professors stand up, even doing keynotes, and tell me that this shouldn't work, that the spindle inside the engine is spinning at about 120,000 rpm. | |
| Now, the idea that that's spinning so fast, it would suggest that as you try and manipulate and move that engine around, it's going to fight you like the gyroscopic effect on a bicycle wheel when you pick one up and spin it, holding it by the spindle. | |
| Actually, there's nothing. | |
| You can't perceive any of it. | |
| And it's because the rotating mass is so small. | |
| But that's one reason why you might find people just assuming this would never work or the heat or the amount of fuel consumed or that the thrust would somehow Tear your arm off and all these kind of reasons. | |
| It was possible in one experiment to dismiss most of those. | |
| Did you have any accidents? | |
| No, not at that stage. | |
| No, but the progression, I mean, you can see all this, you know, or you can see all this online at Gravity Industries YouTube or at Take On Gravity on all our different social media platforms. | |
| If you scroll right back to the beginning and where we've shared a lot of the early development footage, it progressed from one engine on one arm, realizing it was this spongy controllable push, which if you closed your eyes, you could imagine that being the same force you feel that when you're sort of leaning on a work surface. | |
| If you just lean with a straight arm on a table, that table is applying a static force to your hand, which can be simulated entirely by that of a propelling engine, if that makes sense. | |
| And that's the concept, really. | |
| You're just leaning on this force. | |
| Anyway, so it went from one on each arm to two on each arm. | |
| And then we experimented with where do you put the remaining two? | |
| Because we'd calculated you need six of these to be able to get off the ground. | |
| During that phase, yes. | |
| I mean, I fell probably, I don't know, over half a dozen times onto this concrete farm yard, but to be clear, each time from about two foot up. | |
| I mean, it was less dangerous than my cycle commute across London, but a slightly unpleasant but necessary part of the learning journey. | |
| Let's put it that way. | |
| The book says you set fire to a couple of farmers' fields in your time. | |
| Oh, not no. | |
| I mean, singed a bit of ground, but I don't want to paint some picture. | |
| I sort of destroyed an entire season crops or anything. | |
| No, this is a sort of square foot of singeing. | |
| But I mean, that was when we used to try and use, you know, fields or grassland areas and stuff. | |
| And actually, because when the thrust is pointed down for any period of time, it can just start digging that ground up and all the bits go into the engines and stuff. | |
| So that's not really ideal. | |
| So no, we progressed onto a harder, less forgiving, but actually more technically useful surface of being this concrete farm yard. | |
| What's the fuel for these jetpacks? | |
| Is it aviation kerosene? | |
| Yes, so yeah, kerosene, paraffin, jet fuel, diesel, they are all the same fuel. | |
| And I do deliberately include diesel in there. | |
| They are not the gasoline family, which produce a vapor cloud and can, you know, quite aggressively, you know, frankly, you can get gasoline vapor to blow up quite quite, you know, terrifyingly. | |
| Whereas diesel, as most people are familiar, is an extremely benign, sort of gentle fuel in comparison. | |
| So it's actually another reason why this is not as challenging as you might imagine. | |
| It's a very benign, you know, simple fuel to use, really. | |
| Now, it's one thing. | |
| You said you needed six of these. | |
| Is that right? | |
| Back in the day, yes, the very first flight. | |
| So if I started in March 2016, we'd achieved the very first flight all by doing this in evenings and weekends. | |
| We'd done the first flight in November 2016. | |
| And that consisted of two engines on each arm. | |
| So one each side of each arm, the net result of which feels like it's just pushing up your arm, which is much more comfortable. | |
| And then the remaining two, there was one on the back of each lower limb, so the back of your calf area. | |
| The logic being that your legs are designed to be load-bearing. | |
| So it was my thought that, you know, why not get them to join the party here? | |
| The challenge is that the dexterity and control and feedback you have in your arms is massive compared to your lower legs. | |
| They seem to somewhat look after themselves. | |
| And yet when there's sort of a propulsive force on the back of them, your soles of your feet are saying, look, I can't feel the ground. | |
| The ground's gone. | |
| I feel like I need to pedal and find it again. | |
| And yet you've got propulsion on the back of your legs. | |
| So when you pedal, you're deviating that thrust vector, that force direction, to the result that it gives your arms an awful lot of work to do. | |
| But the very first six-second flight was achieved with those six engines in that arrangement. | |
| And you've got two things, it seems to me, that are going maybe in opposite directions. | |
| Your mind, which is trying to control your body, and then you have to control these jackpacks. | |
| Yes. | |
| I mean, well, yes and no. | |
| I mean, in the early days, it was a real gymnastic balance, you know, pat your head and rub your tummy kind of challenge. | |
| We've advanced it so far now to the point where, you know, my 13-year-old, when he was 13, has done a pretty good job of flying this. | |
| We've had 80-year-olds. | |
| We've had, you know, all people from all walks of life. | |
| It now consists of the, you know, similar two engines on each arm, except they're arranged in a configuration, which means as you squeeze the throttle trigger, they actually vector themselves, waft themselves roughly into the right flight position and go weightless. | |
| So now if you close your eyes in that moment, it simply feels like you're leaning with roughly straight arms on a worktop or a, you know, bathroom sink. | |
| And at the back, behind you, not on your legs anymore, you've got one engine, which is roughly the same power as the pair on each arm, on your back, which you don't even notice or think about, which is just gently lifting you from your back. | |
| The result is you create this very inherently stable kind of tripod of support. | |
| And your brain already has most of the wiring it needs to understand what's going on. | |
| If you stumble to your left right now, what do you do? | |
| You put your left hand out to try and find a surface to stop yourself falling over. | |
| Well, now that surface is always there because it's in the form of the propulsion from the engines on your arm. | |
| So your brain, with the benefit of this safety tether that just hangs there behind you to catch you if you stumble and fall over, your brain wires itself beautifully quickly, just like watching an enthusiastic kid learn to ride a bike. | |
| You know, everything's already there, really, in terms of accepting this integration of power with your human balance. | |
| You talk about the electronics control system in the book, and I'm going to quote just one line here. | |
| You say this is primarily in place to take the pilot's simple control inputs and start, accelerate, and shut down the turbines via something called pulse width modulation. | |
| Sounds very impressive. | |
| Is that what we've just been talking about? | |
| Yeah, I mean, that sounds impressive maybe, but it's extremely simple. | |
| The control system on this is designed to be just immensely simple. | |
| So there's a sequence of pressing a couple of buttons to start it up. | |
| Once it's up to idle, you get an indication that the system's ready. | |
| It hands the control back to you, as in, you know, electronically. | |
| And now a trigger, like a sort of gun trigger, is your throttle. | |
| As you squeeze it, you know, a few seconds later, the engines accelerate up to a preset power level, and then they just sit there. | |
| And then it's just like this firm push on your back and your arms, which if you lower your arms and point more of that downwards, you rise up and lift off the ground. | |
| If you flare your arms out a few inches, then there's a slight degradation Of the thrust pointing down, and you sink down again. | |
| And all the maneuverability is as intuitive as steering a bicycle. | |
| If you kind of look to your left, you naturally torque your body a little bit left, and all the thrust vectors move correspondingly. | |
| There is, I mean, the only other control in the system that you have to worry about is a little rocker switch in the other side, which every little nudge up gives all the engines a tiny bit more power, or a nudge down, correspondingly less. | |
| So you can trim the power if you want to, for instance, perform a hard stop or a tight turn, a bit like with any aircraft, you need a little bit more power. | |
| And that's it. | |
| It's extremely simple. | |
| And do you find yourself moving like a Harrier jump jet? | |
| You know, is that the kind of motion that you have where if you vector the thrust in a particular way, then you can move with amazing control and almost grace? | |
| Yeah, so strangely, the Harrier is, or nowadays the F-35, both of those aircraft use vector thrust. | |
| They point basically lots of air downwards and that pushes the plane upwards. | |
| And then they gradually push that thrust behind them and they transition into winged flight. | |
| So, you know, they get enough airspeed over the wings for the wings to then generate lift. | |
| We've actually experienced some of that. | |
| We've got up to 85 miles an hour before. | |
| Obviously a lot slower than those jet fighters, thankfully. | |
| But we've started to generate aerodynamic lift, but it starts to get dangerously fast, even over water, to do that kind of thing. | |
| So we are kind of satisfied, at least for now, with the vectored thrust domain. | |
| And you're right. | |
| I mean, the maneuverability is otherworldly when you see this live. | |
| I mean, in gusting 30, 40 mile an hour winds, I've been able to fly up to a two-meter sort of balcony structure and for fun, be fed a chocolate bar by Ashley Banjo, I think it was from Diversity was over doing some filming with us. | |
| And he just, you know, held the chocolate bar out and like some sort of strange bird feeding exercise, I can fly accurately enough. | |
| I can come up and then just eat away at the chocolate bar. | |
| And each time, you know, pulling away, smiling at the camera. | |
| It's credit to the human balance system. | |
| It is just remarkable. | |
| That's the kind of control that a hummingbird has. | |
| Yeah, actually, that's a more elegant analogy, isn't it? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So yeah, and by the way, this is not just me now. | |
| As I say, we've trained over 400 members of the public and quite some military and paramedic folks, not all of them to that degree, but I mean, many of them, you know, in the space of less than two days to get to something approaching that degree of capability. | |
| We've just unlocked a human capability that we didn't know we had in that sense. | |
| As we come to the end of this segment, talk to me about the first thing that you would deem to be a flight and how that felt. | |
| It probably was that six second wobbly farmyard flight in 2016, because, I mean, it was a question of having learnt from, you know, trial and error to adopt this vectoring concept. | |
| I mean, we had to invent that. | |
| I mean, you know, in terms of applying it to this system. | |
| I didn't know if originally we were going to have, you know, six throttle triggers for all the engines and fly it on the throttles, but actually it turned out this vectoring concept was just so elegant and precise. | |
| But yeah, vectoring down, lifting off, starting to rise, you know, I deliberately only rose about two or three feet, realizing I had to arrest the rise, but still propel myself forward. | |
| You know, my brain's kind of on fire with the patting the head and rubbing the tummy thing all the time, trying to not bottle it and abort early and trying to, at the same time, not fall over or gain dangerous amounts of height. | |
| That six seconds seemed like six minutes to me. | |
| And then coming in for the landing and trying to make sure I stuck that and didn't just tumble and fall over. | |
| And yeah, as the video evidence shows, I landed it, spun around, and it's a grainy phone clip, but I was pretty pleased with myself because I figured right at that moment, this crazy sounding idea that shouldn't be possible had now been possible. | |
| And I was absolutely convinced from then on, we could just enhance it endlessly. | |
| And how much pure engineering from that point did you have to do? | |
| Oh, massive. | |
| I mean, we've now got a great team of over half a dozen engineers who also fly, who employ some of the latest additive 3D printing technology to what we do. | |
| The control systems are now what you find in the latest cars. | |
| I mean, the CAN bus control systems. | |
| Yeah, it's got immensely more clever. | |
| And yet the user experience is now slinging on like a backpack. | |
| And within 15 seconds, you can be in the air, you know, flying as simply as it is to ride a bicycle. | |
| I saw a video before we did this of you on YouTube, and it's labeled the last test flight that you did, I think it was, the most recent one. | |
| You're over a lake and you are flying. | |
| I referred at the beginning of this to that James Bond movie, which I think was Thunderball, where he used a jetpack that was almost like a little aircraft strapped to him, apparently. | |
| But your motion in that is just astonishing, Ruby. | |
| You look like a flying superhero. | |
| You look like something from, and you reference these in the book, The Marvel Comics. | |
| Yeah, so I mean, this is why we call it a jet suit, because it is a bit closer to sort of putting something on and wearing something rather than the traditional sort of 1980s jet pack is a big old box on your back with joysticks and, you know, not taking anything away from that. | |
| It is, it is one step closer to an aircraft than it is closer to you being, you know, I guess a bit like a superhero. | |
| I didn't design it to be a superhero suit, but it is a wonderful sort of benchmark that if we were speaking in California now, that no one would have any hesitation from drawing upon constantly, you know, in the US, whenever we were used to go out there all the time, people would gleefully remind me all the time that, you know, the world of Marvel and DC and superheroes and comic books is a wonderful source of inspiration, whereas we kind of snigger in this country as being a bit childlike. | |
| Actually, you know, the imaginary figure of Iron Man or whatever is a deeply inspirational, powerful concept that people very generously point to when looking at what we do. | |
| I thought you had a slight look of Buzz Lightyear about you. | |
| Well, yes, I suppose that's a bit more jetpack again. | |
| He's got a box on his back with his little spin, you know, little triggery out wings. | |
| But we have actually experimented with wings in that position. | |
| It's tough, though. | |
| The transition, it's another whole subject really, but the transition to aerodynamic flight has been successful with a lower leg wing. | |
| But as soon as you put a wing on your upper body, you transition into an aerodynamic control regime, which is really hard to control when your main control is vector thrust. | |
| Yeah, becoming a little aircraft above about 60, 70 miles an hour is quite an interesting learning journey, I can tell you. | |
| Richard Browning is here, a man who's created a way that you can fly like a bird. | |
| Is that oversimplistic to say those words? | |
| Well, in some senses, I mean, it's more about, I think, adorning the human mind and body with the missing element to fly, which is power, right? | |
| We can't flap our way to that solution, unfortunately, or to that objective. | |
| So by adding that form of propulsion, you know, that we use, you know, little tiny jet engines, then you can start to get, I think, as close as it is possible to emulate the elegance, grace, a small form factor, and I suppose a nimbleness of a bird. | |
| Yes, I guess so. | |
| But to be clear, we do make a lot more noise than a bird, unfortunately. | |
| Okay, bringing up to 2021, then what have you achieved at this point? | |
| How high can you go? | |
| How fast can you go? | |
| How far can you go? | |
| Yeah, so 2016, you know, wobbly first six-second flight, turning a mad idea into something that actually, to our surprise, worked. | |
| Since then, we've done 120 events in 34 separate countries. | |
| We've got very active military search and rescue, you know, entertainment, film work. | |
| We've trained over 400 people here in LA. | |
| You know, you can come to the Goodwood Estate and learn to fly one of these things or just experience it for a morning. | |
| You know, we've got a really healthy, diverse, interesting business around a bunch of technology that has come on leaps and bounds. | |
| So the latest version that we use, for instance, with the Royal Marines just a few months back that was quite well publicized. | |
| I mean, that system will fly for four minutes, which doesn't sound very long, but you can achieve a ludicrous amount in those four minutes. | |
| I mean, it's taking me 17 seconds to assault the Navy ships in the film that you see. | |
| So you can fly four minutes, but that's really, you know, take off within about 20 seconds of putting on the gear. | |
| Fly over any terrain you like. | |
| You can go as high as you like. | |
| It's just a risk factor that you've got to decide if you wanted to entertain or not. | |
| You can land, stow the engines, use your hands for a task, unstow them and immediately take off and relocate around where your objective is or even go back home from where you came from again. | |
| And, you know, speed-wise, we've done 85 miles an hour, but I mean, I think more safely over water, you can get to 60 miles an hour, you know, within a second or so. | |
| So if you wanted to, I mean, one of my favorite places is the Isle of Wight. | |
| And I don't go there nearly enough now, and I must go more. | |
| But there is, you know, the Solent in between the land on the south of England side and the island itself. | |
| Would you be able to now fly the Solent if you were allowed to? | |
| Yeah, so it's funny you say that. | |
| So we did for a BBC show fly the shortest gap, which is the Hearst Castle kind of piece, which is around a mile or so. | |
| I mean, that took me less than 60 seconds to get across there, even despite quite some wind. | |
| And we shot that for the BBC. | |
| And we've now got the capability to probably do, I mean, I don't know, I don't know all the different gap lengths. | |
| And it would depend on the wind direction as well. | |
| But in four minutes, let's call it 60 miles an hour. | |
| That's four miles. | |
| So, you know, you could easily do that kind of distance. | |
| It's not really what our normal aim is to do in terms of just long haul distance. | |
| It's more relocating around a few kilometers. | |
| But yes, you could go on holiday on this with this, the Isle of Way, I guess. | |
| What happens when things go wrong? | |
| They must go wrong. | |
| I mean, if the control system that coordinates the engine packs fails or has a malfunction, something to do with the guidance systems, whatever it might be, or whatever it might be. | |
| I mean, I can't envisage what it might be, but something that loses you your control over these things. | |
| And I spent the summer watching a lot of documentaries about aviation disasters and how they happen. | |
| Quite often, once you lose control, once you haven't got the control, then as a human being, no matter how resourceful you might be, there is nothing you can do. | |
| You're headed for trouble, big trouble. | |
| So if that happens to you and you're up there on one of these things, what happens? | |
| Yeah, no, so this is a really important subject, which we're probably not going to do complete justice to right now. | |
| However, what I'll say is that we fly in a manner where we would reluctantly accept a failure. | |
| And a failure for us is very simple. | |
| It's just simply one or all of the engines shutting off. | |
| So maybe you've made a complete fool of yourself and not fueled it properly. | |
| Maybe there's a complete electrical failure. | |
| Maybe one individual engine has a catastrophic technical problem. | |
| It's extremely unlikely. | |
| We've seen, I mean, I must have fallen over, I don't know, 20 times or so in the development of this in five years and fallen in water five or six times. | |
| The fact that all my limbs work and we've never hurt any of our pilots or anyone is testament to the fact that we are sensible about this and fly in a manner, as I say, where we would reluctantly accept falling from. | |
| We are very lucky because we vector thrust fly these, in other words, moving the thrust vectors rather than throttling them, that we don't have to fly very high. | |
| For military search and rescue and even entertaining huge crowds, you get the most bang for your buck by flying 15, 20 feet or so, and ideally over water or something soft. | |
| As soon as you're flying over concrete or tarmac, we just don't fly very high. | |
| We just really don't need to. | |
| And therefore, we don't have to get into this awful regime of people's lives depending on parachute deployment systems or airbags or all these kind of things, which might not work. | |
| And also, frankly, most of these don't work when you're at an annoying height of around 80, 100 feet, where it's still high enough to do yourself a serious mischief, but not really high enough to introduce very many safety measures. | |
| So actually, yeah, I was going to say, actually, the way to solve it is just simply don't generate the risk in the first place by going high and very fast. | |
| But you talked about an experiment where you went up to two stories, effectively, and were handed a chocolate bar. | |
| Now, if you fell from that height, you could do yourself serious harm. | |
| No, no, as you can see, I think on TikTok or Instagram, no, no, this was like two meters in the air. | |
| No, I mean, that was high enough that I wasn't getting recirculation, but it was, no, that wasn't two stories. | |
| No, but I mean, you could technically, you know, some people seem to think this system pushes off the ground to fly, but I would question their physics if they think that's how it works. | |
| No, so you can go as high as you like, but we don't simply from a failure point of view. | |
| It's very simple. | |
| You just look down all the time and think, if I've got a failure right now, how much is that going to do me a mischief? | |
| But you know the temptation, don't you, when you're doing this thing? | |
| If it was me, if I got, I don't know, eight feet off the ground, I'd be thinking, whoopie, this is incredible. | |
| I'm the king of the world. | |
| I'd want to go higher. | |
| Yeah, so yeah, that's why with our trained clients, we then go and get them to fly over water because you can go 20, 30 feet, no problem at all over water, and all the system floats. | |
| It floats the right way up. | |
| It doesn't do it any good, let's put it that way, but then you are free to experience, you know, the only downside that you experience jumping off a pier wall or something like that. | |
| You know, it's really, I've fallen in the water a lot and it's really not a problem. | |
| So doing anything adventurous, especially with our clients, especially racing, then you just simply do it over water and that solves that problem. | |
| So what is going to be the next milestone in your company's development? | |
| What are you going to do next? | |
| So, you know, I mean, we've built this really wonderfully diverse business model, which includes everything from training special forces groups around the world and my old unit, the Royal Marines, to search and rescue groups. | |
| We can talk about the paramedic side of things. | |
| That's turned out to be a real surprise. | |
| We've got a whole bunch of other niche industrial applications that we are working with as well. | |
| But also, really, I mean, I pause and reflect on what is the point of a Formula One car. | |
| You know, it does push technology forward, but it's primarily to entertain audiences. | |
| And we've done that spectacularly all around the world, even as just individual or dual pilot demos. | |
| Our ambition just before COVID was to build a race series. | |
| We were three weeks away from all getting on a plane to Bermuda to launch the race series, which was going to be spectacular. | |
| And I still think once the world has got over all the COVID restrictions, I think that's something that we'd really like to go and do. | |
| And if nothing else, it is the most joyous, outrageously fun thing I've experienced in my life. | |
| And that is to not just fly a jetsuit and be completely free, as free as you are when you dream about flying, where you can just think where you want to go and you go. | |
| But imagine doing that over water with another three or four pilots in the air that you're all chasing around. | |
| It is just the most spectacular feeling. | |
| So we're determined to bring that back once, as I say, the world is in a better shape when it comes to being able to travel. | |
| Will it ever be something that ordinary people like myself, the limit of my adventure is my little car going down the M3, but would there be a time, do you think, when it would be affordable, when it would be practical for ordinary people to use for, say, I don't know, going to the shops or going to the park? | |
| Yeah, I mean, affordability, I mean, we sold the last one for £340,000, really only because we've only ever sold two. | |
| We don't like selling them. | |
| Even when we do sell them, we keep them on our premises. | |
| And that's purely from a reputational point of view, because, I mean, as you slightly alluded to, just in your last previous question, there is a risk that, you know, just one foolish error with somebody that's bought one of our pieces of equipment and it's going to be our reputation and that person's life that's at risk. | |
| So we just don't need to do that with such a new technology. | |
| However, the biggest impediment really at the moment is probably the noise. | |
| It is like a jet fighter. | |
| It's as noisy as a jet fighter. | |
| So if everybody used them all the time, it would be pretty antisocial. | |
| However, we just launched actually at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, the very first electric prototype. | |
| Now, it's pretty rudimentary. | |
| It only flies for about 15 seconds and weighs twice as what the jetsuit does. | |
| But it's a starting point. | |
| And as the world gets ever better batteries, then never say never. | |
| And people kind of laughed at the first motor cars and thought they were pretty rubbish compared to a horse back in the day. | |
| So never say never. | |
| But for the moment, the analogy would be like taking that Formula One car to the shops. | |
| You could, but no one really does for obvious reasons. | |
| I can think of all kinds of applications. | |
| I mean, I'm just thinking once in my illustrious career, I can remember having to jump from a tender boat onto a pop pirate radio ship a long, long time ago, not in this country. | |
| And, you know, that was a fairly hairy experience, launching myself off this moving tender boat onto a ladder up the side of a ship. | |
| You know, just the once I did that, it was in the Mediterranean when the Mediterranean is normally quite calm on this particular day. | |
| It certainly wasn't. | |
| I could imagine applications like pilots, you know, for ships who pilot ships into port. | |
| If they learned how to use this, what a great way to transfer. | |
| Yeah, you're spot on. | |
| That's a very big one for us. | |
| So yeah, for people not familiar, it is a ludicrous pastime that people do thousands of times all over the world every day. | |
| Tiny little ships. | |
| You jump off that ship onto a moving rope ladder and then climb up a 30-foot high-sided cargo vessel. | |
| I mean, it is bonkers, isn't it? | |
| So that's a good example of just one of the many different applications of where this potentially could be very powerful. | |
| I mean, for the moment, we are somewhat overrun with even the work with the military in the search and rescue alongside our client training and ongoing R ⁇ D. I'm sometimes sort of minded to draw a parallel with when helicopters were first introduced, let's say into the battlefield or into search and rescue. | |
| They were such an unusual capability that there wasn't really the mindset, there wasn't really human experience to imagine being able to lift half a dozen people up and down off any surface and deposit them again in a similar manner. | |
| We are not going to have the same impact as the helicopters had in the world. | |
| However, the same kind of ludicrous new capability that we never really have in our minds, I think it applies. | |
| Every time we've walked into different realms, that search and rescue film that's on YouTube, we got to the casualty in 90 seconds when it took 25 minutes to walk there. | |
| And we learned that actually what matters in that world is that first response with the paramedic. | |
| It's not getting them to hospital. | |
| It's stabilizing their breathing or blood flow, et cetera. | |
| And we were able to do that. | |
| It was a demonstration, but we were able to do that so much quicker than even the helicopter. | |
| Truly remarkable stuff. | |
| Every inventor that I've ever spoken with, and I've spoken with a few in my life, including, I think, Trevor Bayless, I was lucky enough to speak with once from his base near Twickenham, the Eel Pie Island, a wonderful man. | |
| But every inventor always has another idea. | |
| I wonder, are you nurturing another one? | |
| Yes, I mean, the Jetsuit business keeps me pretty busy because it does feel sometimes a bit like opening that wardrobe in the lion, the witch in the wardrobe. | |
| And suddenly there's this whole crazy world of things that people had written off for decades that we can now go and do. | |
| So it's keeping us pretty busy. | |
| But yeah, there's a bunch of things that I look at around me and think, gosh, I think we could do a lot better job of inventing a better solution. | |
| I won't share them right now, but there are a bunch of things that I think when we've got some time, we might go and turn our hand to. | |
| In what sort of typical journalist are in what sort of areas? | |
| Well, okay, I'll tease you and the audience with one idea. | |
| When you look at human clothing, isn't it ridiculous, right? | |
| When we layer on endless different, I mean, ignoring fashion, let's just talk about practicality. | |
| We layer on endless different variants depending on the weather. | |
| And then you look at what the natural world does. | |
| And, you know, all these animals and other creatures out there manage to make do with an adaptive layer of something which is fit for all of the environments they encounter. | |
| You know, a garden bird in the UK survives in minus 10 in the winter and at the moment looking out my window plus 30, you know, in the summer. | |
| I think there's a big opportunity in how clothing could be more adaptive and intelligent rather than, frankly, still medieval. | |
| Anyway, there's a food for thought. | |
| Well, sitting here in boiling heat, I can only agree with you. | |
| Richard, I wish you every success in everything you do. | |
| I love that workshop that you have there. | |
| The book is called Taking on Gravity, A Guide to Inventing the Impossible from the Man Who Learned to Fly. | |
| That pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? | |
| Yeah, thank you. | |
| Yeah, no, that's great. | |
| Do you have a website? | |
| If people want to, you know, if they only just heard about you now, is there a place they can go and learn about you and the company? | |
| Yeah, so I mean, the website is gravity.co. | |
| So it's just.co, not.com or.co.uk, just gravity.co. | |
| But on all the social media platforms, it's taking on gravity, as in your fighting it, taking on gravity. | |
| And YouTube, where you can see a lot of the sort of longer form films, in fact, some of the ones you mentioned, that Wingsuit one, I think, is sitting at 30 million views at the moment, is Gravity Industries. | |
| So yes, you can get lots of visuals to add to what we've been discussing. | |
| I think I've just been talking to one of the great British inventors, Richard Browning. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| The remarkable and the motivated. | |
| Wow. | |
| Richard Browning there, British inventor. | |
| Your thoughts about that conversation gratefully received. | |
| Go to my website, theunexplained.tv. | |
| You can send me an email from there. | |
| Before that, John Greenwald from the Black Vault. | |
| He and I will speak again. | |
| More great material here on The Unexplained coming very soon. | |
| So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes. | |
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