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A British ex-oil trader strapped five jet engines to his body and flew onto a conference stage in Barcelona.
Cisco Live Europe 2020 ran January 27–31 in Barcelona, drawing nearly 20,000 enterprise networking and technology professionals to the Fira Gran Via. Amid the keynotes on cloud architecture and cybersecurity, one session broke the mold entirely: Richard Browning, founder and chief test pilot of Gravity Industries, piloted his jet-engine suit directly into the arena and landed on stage before delivering a talk titled “The Future of Human Flight.” What followed was less a product pitch than a story about quitting a trading desk to build a flying machine in a garage.
- Richard Browning flew his jet suit live into the Cisco Live Europe arena and onto the stage in front of roughly 20,000 attendees.
- Browning, a former BP oil trader and Royal Marines reservist, founded Gravity Industries and serves as its chief test pilot.
- His keynote, “The Future of Human Flight,” traced Gravity’s evolution from crude backyard prototypes to a functioning jet-powered flight system.
From Trading Floor to Test Pilot
Browning’s path to indoor flight demonstrations didn’t start in an aerospace lab. He spent years as a commodity trader at BP before walking away to chase an idea he couldn’t shake: that a human body, properly rigged with enough thrust, could fly under its own control rather than strapped into a wing or a cockpit. His background in the Royal Marines Reserve gave him the discipline for iterative testing, and it’s that grind — not a eureka moment — that he built his Cisco talk around.
He walked the Barcelona audience through the unglamorous early phase: rough rigs, failed attempts, small adjustments made one flight at a time. That backyard tinkering eventually became the six-engine jet suit now associated with Gravity Industries, a system built through the same kind of trial-and-error most of the enterprise technologists in the room would recognize from their own product cycles.
The Stage Flight Itself
The demonstration was the hook that got Browning the keynote slot in the first place. He flew the jet suit into the arena and set down on stage in front of the full Cisco Live Europe crowd — a live, unscripted flight inside a conference venue rather than a controlled outdoor field. For a company built on networking hardware and software platforms, putting a man in a flying suit on the main stage was a deliberate swing at spectacle, and it worked as the visual anchor for everything Browning said afterward.
“We are only limited by our own imaginations, and the ability to take that imagination and turn it into reality.”
Resilience as the Real Subject
Once he had the room’s attention, Browning pivoted the talk away from the hardware and toward the mindset behind it. He framed Gravity Industries’ progress as a case study in entrepreneurial resilience — pushing through organizational inertia, tolerating failed builds, and treating each flight test as a data point rather than a verdict. It’s a framing built for a room full of network engineers and IT leaders who spend their careers iterating on systems that don’t work the first time either.
That message — invention through repetition rather than a single flash of genius — is a familiar thread across garage-built engineering stories, the same spirit behind projects like the drivetrain builds on scratch-built RC engines, where progress comes from small, repeated fixes rather than one big leap.
Applications for Jet Suit Technology
Browning’s suit belongs to a small but growing field of wearable personal flight systems that have drawn comparisons to real-world Iron Man technology, including demonstrations Gravity has given to military teams evaluating jetpack technology for search-and-rescue and tactical use. Cisco Live Europe wasn’t a defense showcase, but the underlying pitch was the same one Browning has made to militaries and rescue services: a human being with enough thrust and enough control training can move through space in ways no existing vehicle allows.
Browning closed his session the way he opened it — not with a sales pitch for Gravity Industries, but with an invitation to the room full of engineers to treat their own stalled projects the way he’d treated a suit that used to barely get him off the ground. No word yet on whether Cisco books him again for 2021, but after flying onto a stage in front of 20,000 people, he’s set a fairly high bar for whatever keynote follows his.
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