To build and commoditize a Jet Suit

 My favorite Challenge:

To build and commoditize a jet suit - Fly like a bird

The challenge:

With one jump you go off the ground, tearing across the limits that kept you to ground, you go into the air all by yourself feeling the fresh air on your cheeks, everything that you see every day getting smaller and smaller, by the time you fathom this feeling you are at your destination. Doesn’t the mere thought of it leave you with a strong urge to covet the experience? This is precisely how I felt when I first saw our own Tony Stark, zooming across the skies in his fictional IRON MAN suit. Every one of us must have had an unsatisfied desire to fly across the skies when we are young, but then later we have simply accepted the fact that our science and technology is not yet ready for our dreams. But is it that far away? Recent developments in this field say otherwise. Richard Browning, CEO of Gravity Industries and the inventor of the Gravity Jet Suit took the first step in this direction. He has successfully developed a gravity jet suit that had made human flight a reality. “The vision was really to go and tackle a challenge that was largely considered to be impossible: the idea that human beings could fly. Having gone and achieved it, it’s opened the door into a whole new realm of human capability, really, human possibility,” says Browning¹. Everything is so fascinating, the dream I have suppressed for years of my life has turned into reality, but here is the twist in the tale. This magnificent invention makes my wallet a $440,000 poorer or simply put it can’t be mass manufactured nor can be available to the larger sections of people as yet. From that moment in 2016, when I first saw this news my dream “TO BUILD A JET SUIT” has taken its anchor, I now dream “TO BUILD AND COMMODITIZE A JET SUIT.”  

But is it really just a toy of our dreams or does it come in handy in our day-to-day lives or even better, solve some grave issues we are currently facing like long traffic congestions and climatic changes. Jet suits are going to be the solution to the problem affecting millions of people in the world, traffic congestion, if designed efficiently and available to the common people at a reasonable price. With the increase in urbanization and vertical development of cities, traffic congestion has become a major problem in all the cosmopolitan cities of the world. Los Angeles leads the way with drivers staying in the traffic for an average of 102 hours a year, and it has cost 19 billion dollars, followed by New York where the costs account up to 33.7 billion dollars². These costs arise from the loss of productivity of workers getting stuck in the traffic, wastage of fuel, etc. All these aside, the gases released from these motor vehicles pollute the air. Jet suits provide a one-stop solution to all these problems. By developing Jet suits, you can put checkmate to the traffic congestion problems. With the adoption of jet suits for the daily commute you can fly and reach your destination, there will be no waiting along the way, fuel conservation, decrease in air pollution and can avail many more benefits. In addition to that, it saves a lot amount of space for parking, which is also a very serious concern, especially in tier-1 cities like Mumbai.

Every coin has two sides. I have listed some pros till now, but what could be some potential issues assuming I make my favorite challenge a reality? One major problem could be to create and institutionalize rules and regulations for human flight. Separate altitude controls and path controls have to be put in place to enable the mass to use this facility of human flight. A whole new system like that of the railway network and roads network should be kept in place, but on the bright side, it can also potentially create employment opportunities. Special and rigorous training has to be given to each flyer before he is given a go to fly. The fuel that is used to provide the thrust during take-off and flight has to be light-weight so as to not hamper the flight experience of the flyer. The fuel also has to be a renewable fuel to be eco-friendly. Jet suits can also prove to be potentially fatal in case of any kind of malfunction during the course of flight given the altitude at which the flyer is flying. While jet suit could be very comfortable for the short-distance travel, the basic suit models can tire a flyer over large distance travels.

In conclusion, I believe Jet suits don’t just satisfy our innate desire to fly; it helps in our daily commute and makes that travel back to home from the office a pleasurable ride. It resolves traffic issues and global warming problem to a significant extent. Though it might pose some issues once it becomes a reality, I believe they can be eliminated through systematic and thorough planning while institutionalizing the system of human travel. Are you excited by the idea? Join me in hoping that I can accomplish my favorite challenge real soon!

Solution to my favorite challenge:

Now that the groundbreaking work of Gravity technologies and Richard Browning has proved that the jet suit can be actually built. Next steps towards the realization of my dream “To build and commoditize jet suits” are to bring down the price of the customized jet suits to an acceptable prize of about USD 50,000 to USD 100,000. Given that Gravity has already received seven orders at the current price of USD 450,000, it is fair to assume that many other people will be willing to buy this product. However, this segment is going to continue a niche for many years or a few decades to come. I choose my first step solution to commoditize the jet suits assuming that the next wave of technological innovation brings the prices lower to the before-mentioned ranges.

My proposed solution has four phases as below:

Phase 1: Awareness Creation

Many people are unaware of the concept “Jet Suit”, even if they are, most of them can only picturize Iron Man’s Jet suit. Application of Jet suit for the transportation purpose is yet an unexplored segment. Hence my first step is to create awareness among the potential “Innovator” segment customers by explaining the working of the technology and the benefits one can derive from that especially in the short distance transportation amongst the ever-growing traffic problems.

Phase 2: Interest

Now that I’ve got the attention of a chunk of your target audience, but can I engage with them enough so that they'll want to spend their precious time and effort understanding the jet suit in more detail? Gaining the customer's interest is a deeper process than grabbing their attention. They will give you a little more time to do it, but you must stay focused on their needs. This means helping him or her to pick out the messages that are relevant to his/her needs.

Phase 3: Desire

The Interest and Desire parts of the AIDA model go hand-in-hand: as I am building the customer's interest, I also need to help him/her understand how what you're offering can help her in a real way. The main way of doing this is by appealing to her personal needs and wants and creating an innate desire in them to buy the jet suit.

Phase 4: Action

Now that I have created the desire to own a jet suit among my potential customers. I have to take special effort in fulfilling that demand with the customized jet suit. Jet suits are highly specific to body structure and other attributes of the person using it, hence this can be both highly important and challenging step.

Before & after Storyboard:

Before:

After:

Prototype:

This prototype consists following components:

•                    Six ECU kerosene microturbines, including two on each arm: automated with the best-in-class power-to-weight ratio

•                    HUD system: the Sony Smart Eyeglass Developer Edition (912-1099) provides fuel and engine status on a heads-up display (HUD) system.

•                    Wi-Fi data linkage: live streaming from the Daedalus suit to ground monitoring and the HUD system.

•                    Fuel air detection: Utilizing medical bubble detectors to provide a fail-safe fuel alert.

•                    Graphene composites: using composite materials to reduce the weight of the suit.

•                    Airbag system: working on an auto-inflate impact protection system (based on motorcycle airbags).

•                    The six jet engines produce 130 kilograms (or 286 pound-force) of thrust and can achieve a speed of about 30mph.

One-day experiment:

I want to conduct a one-day experiment where I conduct an awareness class about the jet suit technology, its usage and benefits to the potential early buyers (tech enthusiasts or one who is curious about a jet flight like I am) and then allow them to test ride the model jet suit. This can not only create awareness and interest; it can also gauge one’s desire to buy once the interest is created. It can also give insights to include or upgrade the existing model specifications that help to reach a wider market.

Hypothesis:

Commercialization is possible (i.e., people are willing to buy and use to use jet suits) once the jet suits prices are fairly reasonable (about USD 100,000).

Cost of experimentation:

The cost break up is given below:

Item	Quantity	Cost	Assumption
Fuel costs	4 * 10	40 *65 rs per liter= Rs.2600	4 liters of diesel is required per person, and 10 people are doing the test ride.
Man-hours	3	3*5000= Rs.15,000	3 professional experts with 5000 per each.
Jet suits procurement	1	Rs.20,000	Assuming that I have access to jet suits and just have a look after their maintenance
Promotional costs & costs to bring the audience	10	Rs.10,000	As it’s a little difficult to get the early adopters, assuming Rs. 1000 expense on each.
Total Cost		Rs.47,600

  

Measurement of success:

I consider my hypothesis a success when enough percentage of people among the participants has expressed the desire to buy the jet suit after the awareness and test run.