Gravity Industries has developed a real-life Iron Man suit and it actually flys. Richard Browning, of The United Kingdom, developed the “Daedalus Mark 1” flight suit and holds the Guinness World Record for ‘Fastest speed in a body controlled jet engine powered suit’. Here is a video of the real-life Iron Man suit in action.

Scroll down for a more in-depth video showing how the flight suit was tested and developed.

The Daedalus Mark 1 Flight Suit

At the heart of this real-life Iron Man suit are five miniature jet engines engines. Two engines are attached to each arm and one is on the back. Each engine exerts approximately 34 kg of thrust or 172kg of thrust total. Richard is confident the suit could fly to over 2,000 vertical feet but he generally stays low to the ground for safety during flight tests and demonstrations. With his arms locked into controlling the thrust and direction of the jets, you can see how it would be difficult to reach a reserve parachute, let alone scratch an itch.

When most people think of kerosene, they think of the oil that powered lamps for the early frontiersmen. You would never associate kerosene with a modern flight technology. Kerosene powers the five ECU microturbines. Richard also uses the Sony SmartEyeglass Developer Edition on his heads up display to provide fuel and engine status information.

Other features include:

• Wi-Fi data streaming from the Daedalus suit to HUD system as well as the ground crew.
• Medical industry bubble detectors provide a fail-safe fuel air detection alerts.
• Graphene composite materials are used for weight reduction.
• Airbag system based on auto-inflating motorcycle airbag designs.

Get your own Real-life Iron Man Suit

Imagine the look on your kids faces when you come home with your own real-life Iron Man suit. Gravity Industries is selling these for the low low price of $443,000. You can also learn to fly it with personal one on one training sessions at the Gravity Industries headquarters. When you consider that the suit burns through a tank of gas in about 4 minutes, that’s a lot of money for short flying sessions.

Below are images courtesy of Gravity Industries

Here is an video with an in depth discussion of the project. It includes several clips highlighting his initial successes and failures.