Talking About Wingsuit Flying
- May 2008
- Dogs Training Uncategorized
Hello Steph,
How does one learn to fly a wingsuit? I’ve never even jumped out of a plane, but it really appeals to me! I’m no newcomer to adventure…..was NPS ranger in Olympic for many years…….then worked in film industry in many areas, including animal trainer (big cats, I raised several). Now I’ve moved back to Sedona, and wonder if there is anyone around here to contact to learn this? Oh, and I had 12 dogs until recently, now only 4. I’m a pro photog, among other things.
That’s about as short as I can make it! Hope to hear something back. Thanks in advance.
Galen
Dear Galen,
The path to wingsuit flight is a full, and fun, one! The first thing you need to do is go to a drop zone and learn to skydive. Usually they want you to do a tandem jump first (where you are strapped to the front of a tandem master). Then you go through AFF, levels 1-7. In this course, you learn how to belly fly (the most basic style of free fall body control), and how to land a parachute, throughout 7 jumps.
After AFF, you need to do a few coached jumps while you jump on your own, through your first 25 skydives. At this point, you have learned to pack a parachute, airplane protocol, belly flight body control, and landing patterns. AFF and the A license can be done over the period of a week, or over a year….just depending on your time constraints and money constraints. In my opinion, it’s better to go all out and obsess out. Jumpers talk a lot about “being current.” The more you are jumping, the better you are going to feel.
Wingsuit flying is the most regulated and potentially disastrous type of skydiving. There are actual wingsuit instructors, and drop zones will not let you jump a wingsuit until you have done at least 200 non-wingsuit skydives. There are many types of skydiving: belly flying, relative work (where you join with people in the air), freeflying and tracking. Most people will encourage you to try to learn some of everything as you progress through your jumps. For myself, I started doing tracking jumps at around my 23rd skydive, and did only tracking jumps until I was ready to move into a wingsuit. Tracking is flying your body as though you are in a wingsuit, without a wingsuit on. The first time I tried it, I loved it, and since I tend to focus in on what I most love, that’s all I wanted to do….I think my brother got me to do 3 sitfly jumps with him once, and then I went right back to tracking! A little obsessive đ
Gradually I started to want to fly a wingsuit. I think that doing hundreds of tracking jumps is pretty good training for wingsuit flying, if a little abnormal compared to how most people go about it.
All of this preparation can take a lot of time and money. The time part isn’t such a big deal, because it’s all very fun!
When you do finally get involved with wingsuit flying, you will see there is a lot to learn, and there are a lot of potential things that can go wrong, which is why skydivers are so regulatory about the learning process. A wingsuit instructor will teach you everything–from how to connect the wingsuit to your skydiving rig, to how to exit the plane and throw your pilot chute, and what flight pattern to take.
You need to think of yourself as an airplane during the jump, and it’s good to talk with the pilot and the other jumpers and be very aware of the plane’s direction of flight. You need to be careful not to fly blindly and end up miles away from the landing area.
It’s an endless progression with flight. At first you will be working hard just to stay stable in the air, and eventually you will be flocking with several other wingsuit flyers, exiting the plane in a tight mass, and flying side by side in the air, or even flying together with your pilot friends if you are jumping from small planes.
When I started wingsuit flying, I had a friend’s old Birdman Classic, which turned out to be a stroke of luck for my learning process. The Classic is the most intuitive, small, simple suit to fly, and I’m so glad I started with that suit. After I was totally comfortable in the Classic, I upgraded to a Phoenix Fly Vampire 2, which is a very big, high performance suit, and not easy to fly. It took me about 30 jumps in the V2 before I even felt relaxed in it, and it was a very different body position from the intuitive, flat flight shape I used in the Classic. I definitely would not have wanted to be in a big suit like that at first, with so much else going on. Now, many jumps later, the V2 feels perfect. But I would advise starting with a small suit like the Phoenix Fly prodigy, or a small Birdman, when you first start flying, anticipating that you will upgrade to a more high performance suit after you are totally comfortable in the small one (able to do jumps out of helicopters, flips and barrel rolls, fly relative with people, etc.).
To me, flying like a bird, with my friends, is perhaps the most amazing experience a human being can have. The more you fly, the more natural it becomes, and it just gets better and better.
Since you live in Arizona, you are fortunate to be somewhat close to Skydive Arizona, in Eloy. It’s one of the prime dropzones in the world–they even have a campground and a bar on their grounds, so you pretty much never have to leave đ Maybe take a weeklong trip to Eloy, and go through your AFF…..from there, the sky’s the limit.
Blue skies!
xx Steph
..As we fly over rock and sand…we’ll drive our ships to new lands –
Steph, was curious why you say wingsuiting is the most potentially disastrous type of skydiving ?
Hi Mike! Just repeating what I’ve been told, as to why the skydivers are so regulated about the progression into wingsuiting…..as in, there are a lot of things that can go wrong when your arms and legs are zipped up into the wings, and that sort of thing. I don’t think it’s a disaster, I think it’s the greatest thing in the world! đ Guess I should have put quotation marks around that!
Hope you’re having fun, Moab is gorgeous.
xx Steph
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Steph,
My granddaughter Kianna says hello from Alabama, as we all do and we wanted to say we think so much of you and Dean and admire the truelly blessed life you guys have. You are a true visionary and a great roll model for all adventure seekers. You and Dean set the respectfull standard for future adventure seekers. Letting poeple know that you can do anything, if you set your mind to it!! The skies the limit or is it? thanks for all you guys do for all of us. I hope the anckle is doing good, tape works wonders huh?
Wow,
The base jumping shots are great.
One question, How far ( distance ) have you flown
in a single flight? Have you given any thought to see how far the wing siut will take you? Keep us posted. Be safe!
do you know the world record for the longest wingsuite flight. I guy i know wants to fly 17kms from one mass of land over water to another mass of land. Is this possibly the longest ever wingsuit flight without oxegen. He feels he will need to be up at 6,500 metres and will also need a strong tailwind
Any thought would be great.
Thanks
Killian
The longest wingsuit flight that I know of was 20.5 km across the Strait of Gibraltar which lasted over 6 minutes.
Thnx for posting all this awesome info Steph, Very useful info…Hope ta see ya in tha sky some day!! đ
This looks awesome. I have done a tandem skydive last month 150,000 ft and well, it was not as exhilarating as I would like. Terminal velocity comes too quickly and just dropping straight.
I hope I can learn to wingsuit fly. It is a lot more involved. How much does it cost roughly to start on that hobby? Is it about a few thousands?
Thanks!
Hi Felicity,
You need to do at least 200 skydives before you are allowed to start flying a wingsuit. So it can get pretty expensive. Going through skydiving training (AFF) would be your first step.
Steph
Dear Steph,
Thanks for the information and your post. đ
Opps, I made a typo. I do wonder though, how it’d be like to skydive from 150,000 feet. I will be in stratosphere. would probably die..
Hey there Steph
Awesome article, looks amazing!
I did a tandem jump a while back, but that was seriously little baby stuff compared to this.
Just watched the brilliant “Asgard Project”, well worth checking out (wingsuiting & climbing).
Is that the legendary Sean “Stanley” Leary of Yosemite in the group plane shot?
Happy flying!
Johnny
I simply want to pass on thoughts. I became Airborne back in 1957. My first real problem was a partial inversion when jumping a T10 at Yuma Proving Grounds. The second time was a static line problem due to poor stowing. Sort of burned my arm a bit and bounced me off the side of a C130A a few times. Then Cw4 Turner tried to have me face a Courts Martial for refuse to drop my newly bebuilt GP bag as he felt I was in danger of a canopy collapse. This was during HALO training. I have always wanted to fly. I am 72 years of age and fly I will. I have the will and way. Now to find a plane and owner who will look straight ahead and ask no questions. Fraught with danger, sure, but so are the Interstates Hiway. Screw danger and regulations. Someone had to have been first as were the Wright brothers. My goal, go off the north face of Pikes Peak and set down, feet first, with no parachute at the US Air Force Academy drop zone. Hell, Army Special Forces have been doing that for years now. Think “HALO”. lSG Okey
I am a leaf on the wind….
i live on an island in the middle of the uk and just gettin off the isle of man  and sorting out hotels can make it expensive………… thats even before payin for the aff, which can be done in a week for ÂŁ1500 roughly. my question would be what is the quickest/cheapest way of fitting in the 200 jumps neccesary to train to fly wingsuits?
would ÂŁ20000 and a year be a good estimate??? lol or am i way under estimating the whole thing haha
 i seriously need this in my life, nothing has ever made me feel like this from just watchin a youtube video.
are there any companys out there that where you can go and stay for a month at a time and just learn learn learn, maybe even provide accomadation. that would be perfect but probably wishfull thinking.alot of things are out of reach for ppl in the isle of man, there are loads of ppl that havnt even been off the rock and travelled to the mainland uk…. very sad.
i NEED the “buzz” in my life, without it i really lose faith with evrything and im always pist off. ive ran out of new experiances living on this island
both my father and brother race bikes and they say without the buzz and risk they dont know what they’d do. im missing that buzz that everytime they race at upto 180mph+ feet away from lamposts, stonewalls trees and even stray pets on the course. my dad is one of only 3 who has recevied a golden replica for the most start/finishes. in the 2week festival ive never known there to be less than 5 deaths a year, Its proper dangerous check the crazy ass s**t out
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGyOQR6mu2M
the only problem is it does not interest me in the slightest thought  never has. i think it may be that iv grown up around it and doesnt seem challenging to me because it just seems normal…. who know’s?
Anyway, all i know is that im prepared to put the time and effort in to FLY, ancient mans eternal dream of flight is now possible. i get the adrenalin by just thinkin of this and that alone makes feel alive. I am totaly serious about using the money saved for a deposit on a house on this lol, what is a house compared to experiencing the feeling of flight.if anyone has any info in the slightest then i will be so so grateful, Thankyou
the best thing you can do is go to Lodi, California because jumps are $13 there versus $40-$50 in the UK….
Just re-reading this. Went through my AFF and A License last week at Lodi. Almost every jump after my AFF was a tracking. The feeling of moving forward, of having wings, rather than merely falling sent a new rush through me that none of my belly flying jumps did.
It’s been one of the most magic weeks I’ve ever had; feeling the sky open up and share the possibility of the most fun and worthwhile adventures.
Now I’m back in CO, craving flight on this winter day. And wondering, as I think about saving for equipment and working on jump #’s and skills, is there certain equipment that works better with wingsuits? (containers, mains, helmets) I am at a unique place of getting to start from the basics, and it would be rad to make the right choice now rather than needing to get different gear in a couple hundred jumps.
Hugs!
you may be bigger than 5’10” 170 lbs (can’t quite remember how big you are). this would be an ideal rig if you were that size range: http://www.dropzone.com/classifieds/Detailed/Complete_Systems/W12-2_Wings_Container_-_Spectre_170_158901.html
rig doesn’t matter that much, but look for a used spectre 170-190 as your main, and you can jump that forever with a wingsuit. I didn’t downsize from my AFF purchase of a spectre 170 until about 2 years ago, because I didn’t much care about the canopy as long as it opened nice and landed okay, which is what spectres are great for. Pilots are also good canopies. You want a big, reliable, non-elliptical parachute. For the reserve, same size as the main or bigger is best: if you have already cut away, you want the canopy to be docile and easy to land potentially off site. I like the Oxygen A3 helmet, and the phantom is also nice. I prefer the full-face visor because I can’t deal with goggles in my vision and it’s also very nice when it’s cold.
Thanks!