- I got an email that said, "Hi, Tom, we've got a jet pack.
"Do you want to try and fly it?"
Yeah, okay.
- Kill switch in. - Kill switch is in.
- Now pull that trigger in all the way and hold it.
Now let go.
Now lean forward a tiny bit, just helps the rear engine.
- Oh boy.
[laughs]
[jet engine spools up]
Wow.
[laughs] Okay.
- Tom is here today to do our light touch flight training.
It's not a full day, but actually even within three or four goes,
you'll see the amazing amount of progress that people can make.
- [laughs]
Oh, wow!
- The very first go is more about getting familiar
with the very unusual experience of feeling this thrust.
It's dialled right down, though.
So you just feel this very spongy, gentle force.
And then what we'll do over the successive goes
is just dial the power up.
And actually Tom can do this himself
with a little nudge switch he's got control of,
and actually then using the tether and everything,
you can actually, in your own time, start to feel the balance and control
and actually begin the first stages of properly flying.
- About 2016, I hatched this idea that
surely couldn't you leverage the human mind and the body?
The mind as the flight control computer
and the body as the flight structure
and just kind of fly in a really unusual way.
And that's what I set about doing,
using the help of little micro jet engines.
- So the suit consists of five little jet engines.
There's two on each arm and one round the back
and together they produce about 144 kilos of thrust.
If you crudely equate that to horsepower, it's around 1050
because it takes that amount of energy to get a human being
with the equipment to just literally sit there and hover.
The only failure mode we have now is something fails and you drop,
so therefore we don't fly massively high.
We always keep it fairly safe.
Woo!
This gets warm.
There's a couple of times I just kind of buzzed my feet with the jets.
- Yeah, better not to do that.
- Yeah, that's hot air! Don't do that.
Okay.
I know what I need to do.
I need to turn off the bit of my brain
that's going, you can control this by thinking it through.
- All right. - Refuel.
- The burn rate is around four litres a minute,
for most of the time. The fuel burn is pretty intense.
With the suits that we're using today,
you can probably sit there for about four minutes or so,
if you really want to.
Most of the events we do, mostly we're flying
for a couple of minutes, 'cos you're so fast and direct.
- You're good to go. - I'm good to go.
- There was a jet pack that featured in James Bond.
There was another one that actually flew into the Olympics.
They were the traditional, almost rocket packs.
You turn it on, hope for the best.
It was a wild ride. They were proper rockets.
In the intervening years,
people have then built similar ones using jet engines,
but there's still a big pack on your back
and it's still kind of armrest and joysticks and things like that.
We tried to take a very different approach of minimising it all.
So you really are just standing there
as a human being with a minimalist amount of equipment.
And you're using your arms as the vector control,
which sounds burdensome,
but it really is not a difficult thing to do.
- I genuinely didn't have any business plans at all
when I set down this journey, but now we're standing here.
We've delivered over 108 events in 31 countries.
We've built this huge kind of passion and excitement
around the world for what we do.
And we've trained over 50 clients to fly this as well.
It turns out a lot of people can learn within a day to do this.
So why not scale that up in the form of a race series?
And if you think of the Red Bull Air Race,
imagine guys and girls from previous sporting backgrounds
hammering around in real-life Iron Man suits.
That's our core focus,
but there's lots of other things going on as well.
- These are about to burst into flame, aren't they?
Let's be honest.
This is not a practical method of transit.
It lasts four minutes in flight before you have to refuel.
It takes four litres of fuel per minute,
and it is devastatingly loud,
but I don't think anyone needs to ask why.
I think the answer's pretty obvious.
Let's do this one more time.
I think more power will kill me, but let's try it.
Yes!
- A lot of people do ask us
whether we could build, for instance, a gyro into it
and then it'll actuators and actually have the engines
maybe, on your shoulders, little actuated arms.
You could do.
I mean, there are plenty of systems out there now
that could be adapted to do that.
You know, a Mavic drone, for instance,
has got all the brain power to be able to do that.
The only thing is, if you start going down that route,
you start drifting away from the original ethos.
You eventually become a passenger in another flying vehicle
that becomes increasingly sophisticated, complicated, heavy,
and frankly not really the original ethos
of just allowing humans to fly.
- Stable flight in three attempts was a bit much to ask for.
But there was a second in there,
there was one second before I span out,
where it felt like I was flying.
If I'd have been untethered, I'd have killed myself. But...!
- No, you'd just be in the grass.
That's pretty impressive,
because I mean, each goes it what, at most, two minutes,
that's six minutes of training.
Could you learn to skateboard, roller blade, ski,
anything else, right?
- No.
- That's not bad progress, right?
- I'll take six minutes of jet pack
for one second of genuinely feeling like I was flying.
That was incredible.
- Good stuff.
- Thank you so much.
- No problem.
Let's get you out of here.
- Let's get me out of here.