UKC

Only just seen this type of action, where wingsuit flyers actually pull back and start to fly upwards for up to 250 feet. Footage on You Tube of them flying towards the base of a Fairhead type cliff in the US then going over the top, and one of a flyer entering the bowl of a volcano before skimming the lip on the far side.

As if wingsuit flying isn't already dangerous enough...

Hmm, the consequences of not getting this quite right are fairly obvious. Maybe "normal" wingsuit flying has become too safe for those who need such a large adrenaline kick.

Interesting to wonder if the difference is in the engineering of the suits or the minds of the flyers. I'd bet people have been generating the same lift forces or more during more conventional downhill proximity flights for a while already.

jk

I dunno, I reckon its natural progression of the sport, technology and method have been developed over the years. Experience has been built upon. The people doing this must deem the risk to be acceptable.

Human beings have been dreaming of flying like a bird since the dawn of time and this must be as as close as we have come.  Imagine what they may be able to do in another 20 years!

just watched a tutorial. It seems to be a case of positive thinking and pushing down with your toes.......

It's hard for me to see that in wingsuiting even over the next 20 years there can be much more of an advance than going from a 80m height gain (flare) to a 150m flare.  Even if they got to that it is still a comparitively small and very short term reversal in the inevitable downward trajectory. The record flight time is 9 minutes and thats jumping from 11,000m using oxygen.

This is really impressive but seems like veru well controlled falling to me rather than flying.

Paragliding or hang gliding seems in many ways much closer to flying like a bird, able to stay in the air all day and cover hundreds of miles to a destination of your choosing when conditions are good.

I'm thinking it might be a spiffing photo opportunity for Johnson , if we can convince him it will help his failing popularity. 

Union Jack wingsuit smack straight into the side of a volcano .

;-D

I can see some nut maybe trying a flared 'landing' up and over a dam into water if the right site could be found and some way to train for it figured out.

Jk

There's a video of an italian landing chuteless on Lake Como but I think it's a fake, unlike the chuteless cardboard box landing. 

As for your dam wall stunt I don't understand the physics of it much but at the end of the flares  they seem to stall and if you stalled too high above the water it would be curtains, unless you managed to deploy the chute.

I 've always thought the best option would be a pair of mini skis and a snow slope at just the right angle.....

If you got it right you'd end up running out of vertical speed somewhere just above the dam wall then with your remaining and falling groundspeed plop over it into the water. If!

As you say, there's a very narrow window between dead one way and dead another but that never seems to deter people!

I can think of a couple of ways one might train for it comparatively safely. It sounds mad but no madder really than air to air transfer or landing in boxes! Maybe even less so, the face first box landing is totally bonkers, at least this way you could bleed off a lot of ground speed before 'landing' and feet not face first!

jk

Can't be that difficult. When sykdivers pull their cord they always seem to go upwards really quickly.

E

All the fabric would make for an absolutely brutal stop in water so while the approach probably is possible the landing maybe never is.

jk

How about flaring up to literally land standing up on an object? I guess a very tall tower or overhanging dam would have the option to pull the chute if you fall short.....

Problem is the groundspeeds are in the 100km/h mark

Anyway, here's some cool dam flare action  youtube.com/watch?v=uXGowLvRPWc&

I see crows doing that all the time. Can't be that hard.

Augmented reality during high altitude flight.

Never seen a bird flying around sitting on a reclining chair and pulling on strings. I'll be going swimming like a dolphin tomorrow in my windsurf board so will keep an eye out for them

Damn cool indeed!

Had actually seen that before but forgotten about it.

He must have flown 200/300 m horizontal at about 5m above the water.

Also  a beautiful piece of film in its own right.

It doesn't work that way. You can never get close to having both horizontal and vertical speed of 0. One or the other, or both, are always high.

In reply to the OP:

Wingsuiting is little more than a creative way to die on an adrenaline high. A _hell_ of a lot of fun, to be sure, but the death rate is like nothing else and the cutting edge of the sport where people try ever more complex stuff is a bloodbath. I would probably go as far as saying that if you are wingsuiting regularly, you have probably managed to divorce yourself quite effectively from reality because I don't believe these guys are intentionally killing themselves.

As per Woody, “That wasn't flying. That was falling with style.”

Why not? Is this in principle from the physics or just in practice?

How much worse is it than cutting edge superalpinism at high altitude? Isn't it just a matter of degree?

Or Honnold type soloing?

I suspect it's currently similar to the early years of BASE jumping. No doubt it will eventually become safer (but not safe).

But they've had millions of years to evolve. When wingsuits are genetically engineered to the flyer (plus concrete chins for those buying the farm) they'll have a chance.

This one is a good watch as well, Facebook link only though but worth it. Probably the most creative use of a flare ln a base jump, going up and over a hill to change valleys and  corkscrewing down from the apex to dive into the famous "crack"

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1094242547631314&id=1134931...

I remember a doc (on channel 4 I think) about an American called Jeb Corliss, who I think was at the top of the game, at least at the time of the doc. He'd had a lot of trauma and was obviously mentally ill (came across basically as a total psycho). He'd done a tandem jump with a friend where one was to go above a bridge and Jeb below. The other guy slammed into the bridge and was killed instantly and Jeb, his friend, seemed totally unaffected by it. 

Or concrete shins in the case of Jeb Corliss and his Table Mountain scrape...

I thought this was going to be about those mad flights they do at night with a pyrotechnic flare taped to their foot!

Which is the 'stall' referred to by someone else. Birds do it, so could wingsuiters.

In reply to Toerag:

I don't think so. Birds fly, wingsuiters don't fly, they fall/glide. I don't think that the laws of physics in Earths gravity and through our atmosphere at standard pressure will allow something that has such a small cross-sectional area to such a large mass as a wingsuiter to ever convert sufficient horizontal speed into vertical lift speed to allow them to reach a point where they have enough time on the "up" to shed all their horizontal speed.

Relative to birds, they have a tiny cross-sectional area to work with relative to their mass and the horizontal speed of a wingsuiter is fundamentally limited because they must contend with the horizontal drag of the air and they do not have any means of propulsion.

I think that even starting at maximum possible horizontal speed, the maximum lift from the flare will always be small enough that they will start to drop again long before their horizontal speed has reached anything approaching 0.

I'm not a physicist though so it would be really interesting to see these calculations worked out.

Maybe? I lack the stats to judge, also "wingsuiter" is a pretty easy group to define, "high altitude superalpinismer" is a lot trickier to define, so comparing the two would also be tricky. Got any stats to hand for the comparison?

Seems to support the divorced from reality theory at least. Though I'd be cautious about generalising from him to all other wingsuiters, if I was making a documentary about a crazy-dangerous new extreme sport, I'd want it to pop, pop, pop and the best way to achieve that is to pick someone for your documentary that is absolutely bonkers.

Funnily enough I did a question at school recently about a ball thrown against a constant horizontal force. Part of it asked you to prove that for the right force, the ball could travel upwards in a straight line then come to rest momentarily. Obviously a wingsuit is far more complicated but at high horizontal speeds it ought to be possible to generate a lot of lift for a short time.

But wingsuiting can be done really quite safely from a helicopter well away from any mountains. It is only proximity flying that makes it dangerous.

I don't really understand the question you are explaining, I feel like I need more information.

I can believe that you could produce at least a fair amount of lift for a short period of time but I don't believe you can get close to be stopped in mid air without a significantly greater surface area than any wingsuit existing today. At this point I'm just repeating myself though so I'll just wait and see if a physicist comes along with the right equation to prove it one way or another. Looks like the horizontal speed record is just under 250mph though, so that's a useful data point for doing any calculations.

I think it may be closer to cave diving during the seventies, when fatalities rocketed and have now fallen almost to zero due to enforced training in most countries and pretty much universal safety rules following analysis of the rise in deaths. A lot of early pioneers tend to push at the limits and accept the greater risks? 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265225507_American_Cave_Diving_Fat...

Here's the UK figures which are small statistically, but give a more straightforward analysis

https://cavedivinggroup.org.uk/the-learning-curve/

It might be impressive soloing El Cap, but in reality soloing at a 30 metre crag and falling from near the top is close to as likely to kill you.  It doesn't take long to get to terminal velocity when falling, and from there extra height just means you have longer knowing the end is coming.

Agreed. I was also thinking about soloing near the limit of one's ability, which i had thought Honnold was doing on the infamous boulder problem move, but I think I was wrong about that.

You'd need a set of lift drag curves for the relevant Reynolds numbers and you need to know the structural limitations: Vne (the never exceed speed) and the maximum 'vertical' acceleration the structure (arms, legs, back, fabric) can withstand.

My guess is the structural limitations in the early, high speed, part of the pull up are limiting then as the airspeed rapidly bleeds off you're left with insufficient lift force to complete the quarter loop. Gut feeling, I'd guess somewhere between 30 and 60 degrees up is maybe possible and since delta wings never really fully stall you'd be flying (ish!) right to the apogee where you'd have very high angle of attack, very high drag coefficient and quite low airspeed (which is also your ground-speed at apogee). You could in theory of course also use the airspeed you'd re-gain falling from apogee to scrub off more of the residual ground-speed. The shape of the curve you'd fly (a pretty flat partial ellipse-ish) would make doing anything useful with that maneuver very dangerous, since you'd need to use almost all of the available flight envelope throughout the whole maneuver split second decisions very far out from the target would have big and essentially uncorrectable implications for the volume of sky you could ultimately reach at a survivable groundspeed (assuming you're flying up and over a lip).

There's certainly nothing theoretically stopping me bringing an appropriately structurally rated conventional glider to a 0,0 speed dead stop by pulling up. There is also the less stomach-churning method: finding a patch of sky where the airflow perfectly matches/counters the glider's descent. Lovely when it happens but an unlikely find for a wingsuiter!

jk