If you’re reading this, it most likely means you’re an avid traveler. We bet you can name more than a few amazing destinations that you’ve visited and have a laundry list of places you’d like to see next. Yeah, we love it too, but let’s get real, there’s one part of traveling that we sometimes dread: flying.
Having to go to the airport, get through security, board our planes, and sit next to a stranger for hours on end can be less than enjoyable, but we deal with it because traveling to a new place is well worth the hassle. But, what if you could do without that airport downer and instead fly anywhere using your own personal jet pack?
British entrepreneur Richard Browning is trying his best to make that dream a reality: he has invented, built, and tested his own personal jet pack, which he calls the “Daedalus.”
According to The Mirror, the pack consists of a specially designed exoskeleton to fit Browning’s form, four arm-mounted gas turbine engines, and two hip-mounted gas turbine engines. And to say this thing looks totally insane would be an understatement.
"I've got this vision. It sounds audacious, but let's just stick it out there," Browning said at a Ted Talk he gave about his product earlier this year. "One day maybe we can rise up above a beach, fly up and down the coastline of it, rise up a bit higher, with some of the safety kit we're working on to make this achievable.”
He told The Mirror he believes his suit will soon be able to fly several hundred miles per hour at a height of 1,000 feet.
For now, however, his suit is flying through the air at the breakneck speed of 32.02 mph, which was actually fast enough to earn Browning a Guinness World Record for the fastest speed in a body-controlled jet engine-powered suit. Though, to be fair, it’s not like he has a lot of competition for this title.
So how long until you can buy your own version of Browning’s jet pack and start flying for yourself? According to Browning it won’t be tomorrow, but it won’t be forever, either.
"I don't think anybody's going to go down to Walmart or take the kids to school in any of this stuff for a while, but the team at Gravity are building some awesome technology that's going to make this look like child's play," Browning told The Mirror. "We're working on some things that will seek to bring this unusual experience of flight to a wider audience, beyond the events and displays we're doing."