Jet suits: Game changer in military modernisation, can do what tanks & helicopters did in 90s; what are they?

In the movie Iron Man, we saw Tony Stark flying in the sky without an aircraft, but more like one itself, wearing his suit. In the recent Bollywood movie, Pathaan, the lead actor Shahrukh Khan was also seen flying in the sky with the help of some gear worn on his arms and body. These are called jet pack suits, and they do not just exist in movies but are part of real military drills and rescue operations now.

UK’s Royal Navy and the US Marine Corps are already using these jet pack suits in various limited roles and soon, we will also see soldiers of the Indian Armed Forces wearing these suits, as part of military modernisation. 

In January, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) issued a Request For Proposal for a total of 48 jet pack suits for emergency procurement through the fast track procedure. According to reports, these might be used along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China in Indian Army’s attempt to bolster its overall surveillance apparatus. 

There is only one company that exports these jet pack suits to militaries around the world, Gravity Industries. It is a UK-based company started by Richard Browning. He invented his Daedalus Flight Pack back in 2016 which enables the person wearing hover and fly. 

The company, Gravity Industries: Flight Club was set up in 2016 and started building and designing these jet suits. 

Speaking to WION, Browning talked about what other gears these suits come with and how their capabilities can be best utilised in the modern military. 

How do these jet-pack suits work?

Jet pack suits are different from the ones that we saw in the movies; these are more sophisticated and require a lot of arm strength of the person for manoeuvring the route. 

The entire pack of a single jet suit is made of smaller units “to essentially push air downwards and that allows you to rise up. Because it is a suit, it is something you wear, it feels as natural and as intuitive as skiing or snowboarding or riding a bike or even running after a while."

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Once you wear the suit and have proper training in flying, hovering and manoeuvring, it almost starts feeling like your second skin, wearing which “you can go wherever you want to go,” Browning said.

Training to become a jet suit pilot 

The training and learning for using a jet suit for flying are different from that of a plane. While it takes at least a year to learn how to fly a plane, it hardly takes a day to completely learn how to fly a jet suit. 

Browning said some people take “only half a day to know how to fly them”. 

“But realistically, we usually spend a few weeks with militaries fir proper training. But it’s quicker than learning to do most things, and for the military, it’s a very quick process,” Browning said.

Gravity Industries has its own training grounds in Goodwood Estate, England. 

“The whole training is done on a platform with safety measures, you can have a long zip wire to train with and then you fly on the water,” Browning said.

And even when you're not flying on water, these safety measures ensure the person a safe flight experience. “Because we have a very precise control and it is vector thrust control that allows us to remain hung even when we are extremely low to the ground”. 

A whole new capability 

Gravity Industries has been working with these jet suits on two fronts, with militaries and with people who just want a new experience or the thrill of flying. 

Browning told WION that they have been “working with half-a-dozen elite special forces around the world, they are all in different stages and development. We train some of them, we have done exercises with many of them and we are working on leases and sales to others.”

Talking about the relevance of these suits in the military, he said it’s a whole new capability. “It’s like, in some ways when the tanks were invented in the 1920s and the helicopters in the 1960s, it took the First World War and the Vietnam War to really prove just what a revolutionary capability they were.”

“Now, jet suits are not going to have such big entitlements, but it is a startling new capability and whole new tactics have to develop around exploiting those capabilities.” 

Drones and jet suits

There was some talk that jet suits can be the next drones in warfare and commercial spheres. But that seems quite far right now because jet suits are still in the developing phase and have some limitations. 

But there is one possibility also of using drones with jet suits to make the duo much more efficient. “The lovely thing is that, working with drones, like a drone carrying a weapon or a drone carrying cameras or fuel” increases the usability of jet suits, opening a realm for them in the commercial field as well.

In addition to military operations, Gravity Industries believes jet suits hold potential for search and rescue missions in harsh terrain. At a recent NATO Mountain Warfare Rescue Exercise, they carried out flights in jet suits in separate rescue and military demonstrations. Browning himself donned the jet suit and delivered blood plasma to an ‘injured’ soldier who had been rescued from a gorge in the Slovenian mountains as part of the exercise.

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