Jet suits were once believed to be the future of personal mobility, but a large number of factors have prevented this from happening – not least of all being the high price and relatively short duration of the flights.
That’s not to say that there isn’t a future to them, though. Gravity Industries, founded by British inventor Richard Browning, has been on the market for 10 years and, after one of them was spent in talks with the Great North Air Ambulance Service, a possible new partnership looms. Gravity and GNAAS have tested out the first paramedic jet suit in the mountainous terrain of Lake District.
The idea is to get a paramedic to a victim in a fraction of the time a unit could reach him or her by car or on foot. In this particular exercise, included in the video at the bottom of the page, a climb that would have taken 25 minutes by foot was covered in just 90 seconds. In any emergency scenario, these are potentially life-saving minutes.
Andy Mawson, director of operations at GNAAS, piloted the jet suit for the simulated rescue operation, noting that the paramedic would also carry a rescue kit and flares to summon helicopter support.
“The biggest advantage is its speed,” Mawson explains in a statement to the BBC. “If the idea takes off, the flying paramedic will be armed with a medical kit, with strong pain relief for walkers who may have suffered fractures, and a defibrillator for those who may have suffered a heart attack.”
“We are just scratching the surface in terms of what is possible to achieve with our technology,” Richard Browning adds. “Emergency response is one of the areas Gravity is actively pursuing, alongside launching a new commercial training location at the world-renowned Goodwood Estate.”
Before going into emergency response, Gravity attempted to go down the commercial route with its jet suit, in between setting some records and putting on public displays meant to drum up publicity. In 2018, for instance, one such jet suit went on sale at the upscale Selfridges in London, with a price tag of no less than £340,000 (approximately $436,582 at today’s exchange rate).
Also then, the three-engined jet suit was able to fly continuously for only about 9 minutes, at 32 mph (51.5 kph) and altitudes of 12,000 feet (3,657 meters). Gravity didn’t say whether these figures still apply to the current version of the suit.
The idea is to get a paramedic to a victim in a fraction of the time a unit could reach him or her by car or on foot. In this particular exercise, included in the video at the bottom of the page, a climb that would have taken 25 minutes by foot was covered in just 90 seconds. In any emergency scenario, these are potentially life-saving minutes.
Andy Mawson, director of operations at GNAAS, piloted the jet suit for the simulated rescue operation, noting that the paramedic would also carry a rescue kit and flares to summon helicopter support.
“The biggest advantage is its speed,” Mawson explains in a statement to the BBC. “If the idea takes off, the flying paramedic will be armed with a medical kit, with strong pain relief for walkers who may have suffered fractures, and a defibrillator for those who may have suffered a heart attack.”
“We are just scratching the surface in terms of what is possible to achieve with our technology,” Richard Browning adds. “Emergency response is one of the areas Gravity is actively pursuing, alongside launching a new commercial training location at the world-renowned Goodwood Estate.”
Before going into emergency response, Gravity attempted to go down the commercial route with its jet suit, in between setting some records and putting on public displays meant to drum up publicity. In 2018, for instance, one such jet suit went on sale at the upscale Selfridges in London, with a price tag of no less than £340,000 (approximately $436,582 at today’s exchange rate).
Also then, the three-engined jet suit was able to fly continuously for only about 9 minutes, at 32 mph (51.5 kph) and altitudes of 12,000 feet (3,657 meters). Gravity didn’t say whether these figures still apply to the current version of the suit.