Next Up for SEALs: Upgraded Batman-Style Grappling Hook Gun

Even Navy SEALs need to feel like Batman sometimes. Especially when they're trying to scale walls or board ships.

Enter Jim LaBine of the defense company Battelle. For years, Battelle has manufactured a tool for SEALs that the Dark Knight might haul from the Batcave: a pneumatically fired grappling hook, launched from an intimidating black cannon about the size of your arm. It's called the Tactical Air Initiated Launch, or TAIL, and LaBine designed it. It's even been featured on MythBusters. Six months ago, LaBine opted to upgrade it.

SEALs wanted something 'that could clear a two-story building,' LaBine explains during a Washington, D.C. special-operations conference. So he designed something that's meant for scaling a much, much taller building instead. Pictured above, the RAIL, or Rescue Air Initiated Launch, is a collapsible metal grappling hook. It's given a lot of extra lift to the gun's ability to get a SEAL over an obstacle.

The grapple on the TAIL is an unyielding metal claw. It's good for getting its hook into a surface 100 feet high and towing a sturdy, nylon-jacketed line or ladder for someone to ascend. But the claw is inflexible, and that poses problems for its use. 'I'm limited by it,' LaBine says, 'but it's got elements that want to let me go further and higher.'

The RAIL operates more like Batman's actual climbing tools (with the caveat being that neither Batman nor his gadgets are real). It folds like an umbrella into the TAIL's barrel, and only flexes after firing, opening into a claw shape at the end of the drag. According to LaBine, it more than doubled the TAIL's upward maximum range, to 250 feet. Search-and-rescue teams might want to use it as well as the military, he thinks.

One problem: according to a video LaBine showed me, the RAIL makes a loud, whistling sound as it sails through the air, so it's not good for a stealth raid like on the bin Laden compound. (There's 'some loud noise,' LaBine concedes.) It's not yet for sale, according to Battelle, so it may have some tweaks on the way before SEALs get to use it for, say, getting aboard a hostile ship. Or even swooping across Gotham's rooftops.