A paramedic wearing a jet suit has soared to the top of a mountain in 3.30 minutes in a rescue that would take an hour and 20 minutes by foot.
Video of the flight shows medic Jamie Walsh as he soars up Mt Helvellyn in the UK’s Lake District using a Gravity Jet Suit.
The test flight took Walsh up 670m (2200ft) and covered 19km (1.2 miles) of rugged mountainside terrain.
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The paramedic starts crouched on a gravel track at the bottom of the mountain and then blasts off like Tony Stark in Ironman.
A heads-up display shows his point of view as he soars over the rough terrain at speeds of up to 37km/h (23mph).
The cloud cover gets incredibly thick near the top of Mt Helvellyn.
Visibility was so bad the two drones filming Walsh could not continue.
And that’s one of the reasons the Gravity Jet Suit is being looked at by search and rescue, and the military.
A helicopter would have no chance of a rescue with this sort of visibility.
And the Lake District is not an area that’s known for clear blue skies…
If a climber was having a cardiac arrest at the top of the mountain and getting there by foot took 70 minutes, the chance of saving them would be severely limited.
That’s why Great North Air Ambulance Service (GNAAS) was involved in the test flight.
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Walsh, a medic with GNAAS, took trained for six days in the Gravity Jet Suit before the flight.
“If you’re a cardiac patient or somebody that really needs critical care, 1 hour 20 minutes is often too long for really important cases,” Richard Browning, the founder and chief test pilot at Gravity Industries, said.
Supercar Blondie previously chatted with Browning about his incredible creation.
You can watch the video of that below:
The Gravity Jet Suit specs
- Jetpack makes 1050hp
- Thrusters on the pilot’s back and jet engines on each arm to use for steering and acceleration
- Five gas turbine propulsion systems
- Jet suit weighs about 25kg plus 8-10kg of fuel
- 144kg of thrust
- Flight time is about 3-4 minutes
- Max speeds for a regular flight can nudge 50mph
- Founder and chief test pilot Richard Browning has hit 136km/h (85.06mph) to set a Guinness World Record for Jet Suit speed
- The suit is made from polymer, aluminum and titanium 3D printing processes
