Wingsuit Flight
- July 2009
- Fly
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….
Someday…someday. 🙂 Great post. Thanks!
I should stop reading your blog Steph… and totally unfollow you on twitter because you are so bad for my health 😉
A long time ago I was looking for a new sport to add to my climbing and it was a toss-up between scuba and parachuting. I went with scuba primarily because I wasn’t sure that I would get the jumps in because of the changeable weather here in the UK. They’re both expensive sports and I wanted to get the best out of whichever I chose.
So, I’ve done a lot of diving, done a lot of training, delved into the technical side of diving, seen some amazing things, enjoyed it immensely and had a lot of fun along the way.
But I haven’t shaken off the desire to go free fall and every time I see your pics and watch the videos you post I drool, almost uncontrollably. Its not a pretty sight and I apologise unreservedly for my total lack of self control.
…unfortunately my monitor seems to have a fault and it hides text that says ‘unfollow’ and never flashes up a warning message saying ‘don’t visit this web site’. How pants is that? 😉
I enjoy the photos and the video enormously… thanks for sharing. Maybe someday we’ll meet on a DZ somewhere.
Steve
Thanks Steve….I think! 🙂 You know, a lot of skydivers are also way into scuba diving. Seems like the two pursuits complement each other quite well, water and air. And if you are from Britain and you go to the Lodi Drop Zone in California to do a bunch of skydives, the $15 jump tickets are about the price of a sandwich with your exchange rate….
Oh Steph, you’re so PRACTICAL! Which is funny since jumping out of a plane or off of a cliff rarely tops anybody’s list of practical things to do. But when it comes to insane activities you’re very reasonable, for sure 😉
I think I’m up to jump #12 now but definitely looking forward to wingsuit flights when I’m more experienced. Who wouldn’t? Look at that smile!