Recently, a large number of mesmerizing videos of people planning in the air in special suits have appeared in the network. The sight of daredevils soaring at the height of bird’s flight cannot leave indifferent, the heart is squeezed after each of their turns.
The name of this super extreme sport is wingsyutting. The idea to fly in special suits was borrowed from flying squirrels. For a long time attempts to design a suit for flying ended tragically. It was only about twenty years ago that a modern, reliable form of wingsuit was developed. The suit was equipped with three wings (instead of two as in earlier versions), fitted with two layers of fabric capable of being filled by the surging air current.
Getting the ability to plan above the ground is not available to everyone. In order to start flying in a wingsuit, it is necessary to make at least two hundred parachute jumps beforehand.
Unlike skydiving, the movement is not downward, but forward, reminiscent of the flight of a bird. The wingsuit is controlled by changing the angle of fall or body position.
The picture that opens to the eyes of a wingsuiter is worth hundreds of preliminary skydives. During one jump, the pilot flies about 2.5 kilometers across the horizon for one kilometer of altitude. It’s just hard to believe that a person flies up to five kilometers in a couple of minutes.
Several times more adrenaline can be obtained if you make jumps in a wingsuit from a steep mountainside, flying literally a couple of meters from the cliff. The structure of the suit and the flight in the direction of the slope traverse allow the pilot to follow the mountain terrain as much as possible, perform various maneuvers, adjusting the height above the slope and quite quickly get to a safe distance from the cliff to open the parachute.
To perform a jump, the pilot climbs to an altitude of about four kilometers. The initial flight speed is about 180 kilometers per hour.
The author of the modern version of the suit is the French designer Patrick de Guairdon. In order to model a wingsuit, the author studied the flight technique of flying squirrels for many years.
As a result, having improved the flying suit, Patrick achieved almost impossible – he made a jump from the plane, a few kilometers below caught up with him and climbed back! His total number of parachute jumps exceeded 12,000. Eight years after the first wingsuit test, de Gairdon tragically died due to the failure of the main parachute during one of his jumps.