Wingsuit Flight
two birds from steph davis on Vimeo.
People ask me a lot of questions about flying wingsuits, most of which I can’t answer because they involve things like glide ratios and math. What I can say is it’s fun. As in FUN. And practical too. In a normal skydive, you freefall for about 50 seconds. With a wingsuit on, you can easily get two minutes of flight from the same altitude. So you can see right there, at $22 a jump, that wingsuiting is clearly more economical. Moreover, if you are base jumping, one of the biggest things that can go wrong is hitting the wall. So with a wingsuit on, you are pretty much guaranteed to be very far away from the wall by the time you open your parachute. Fun AND practical…
You are easily flying forward at about 80-100 miles per hour when you really get going. So it’s kind of like being on a motorcycle, except you are the motorcycle and you’re in the sky…. You are able to turn, slow or increase your forward speed, do flips, fly on your back, side slide, and pop up and down vertically. It does take a long time to get these skills, because you only get to fly for two minutes every time you do a skydive–less if you mess up your exit from the airplane and tumble through the air, losing altitude. Imagine you were trying to learn to ride a bike for the first time, and you only got to try it for two minutes a time. Flying can definitely take some time to learn.
Things get really fun when you are flying with a friend. Again, I imagine it’s something like riding a street bike at high speed, and trying to line it up right next to another rider, match speeds, grab their hand, and then keep riding hand in hand. Except you are surrounded by nylon and air, rather than metal and asphalt, and you have a whole extra dimension to play with….
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http://momenti-bei.blogspot.com Katie
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Steve Orrell
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Steph Davis
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Abbey