Inventor who built an Iron Man-style flight suit has flown it at TED

Re:Inventor who built an Iron Man-style flight suit has flow... by SideburnsOfDoom on Friday April 28, 2017 @11:59AM (#14220482)

> Learning to hover

But if there's no ground effect in those videos, then he can already hover. So if there's plenty of footage of stable hovering at 0.5 meters "in mid air", why is there none at all of hovering at 3.0 or 5.0 meters? It doesn't entirely convince me that it can be done.

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Re:Inventor who built an Iron Man-style flight suit has flow... by Robotbeat on Friday April 28, 2017 @12:31PM (#14220815)

For the same reason that just because you can balance on a balance beam 30cm from the ground, you'd probably be hesitant balancing on one 5 meters off the ground.

EDIT: If you want to see him testing the concept in a bunch of iterations, you can check out the vimeo page here: https://vimeo.com/gravityindustries/videos/

Arguably, the leg-mounted jets COULD be close enough for ground effect, but they're apparently destabilizing so they switched to two backpack-mounted engines instead.

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Re:Inventor who built an Iron Man-style flight suit has flow... by SideburnsOfDoom on Saturday April 29, 2017 @06:22AM (#14225867)

> just because you can balance on a balance beam 30cm from the ground, you'd probably be hesitant balancing on one 5 meters off the ground

I get what you're saying, but when applied to someone supposedly building flying machines, I just find it a bit of a thin rationale.

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