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Closer to Human Flight

Posted by Hemos on from the icarus-here-we-come dept.

negativeblue writes "Dropzone.com has (had) a story about the preparation of a man (Jeb Corliss) who prepares to land a wingsuit without a parachute. If you don't know the current abilities of parachutes, now-a-day, you should do your research. Basically airfoils, they can perform close to an airplane wing (high performance turns and lift)."

8 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. May I be the first to say... by TrollBridge · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...that this guy is more likely going to win a Darwin Award than survive his fall.

    Oh well, I guess something's got to thin the herd...

    --
    There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
    1. Re:May I be the first to say... by R2.0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I disagree. Darwin awards highlight an obliviousness to the dangers of doing something. This guy seems fully aware of the dangers - he is doing testing and development, so that he will NOT die. He may fail, and hence die, but it won't be for lack of awareness of the danger of what he is doing.

      --
      "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
  2. Is it really flight? by bildungsroman_yorick · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's more of a very impressive controlled fall. Can the wing suits be used in conjunction with parachutes so as to have a back up in case of a failed opening?

  3. Human flight? by Anubis333 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Human flight? don't you mean slowed and directed human falling? It's not like he can leave the ground as soon as he starts flapping his wing suit.

    There are a few people that have fallen out of commercial airliners and survived. They didn't have wing suits and fell thousands and thousands of feet.

  4. surviving falls by jeif1k · · Score: 4, Insightful

    as no one has ever survived a landing attempt without a parachute.

    I don't know whether people have survived "attempts", but you can certainly survive falls from airplanes without a parachute: hitting brushes, trees, water, or snow can break your fall sufficiently so that you don't die. Theoretically, even hitting a solid, hard surface is survivable if you break the fall correctly (but I don't know of any actual cases).

    1. Re:surviving falls by pclminion · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Theoretically, even hitting a solid, hard surface is survivable if you break the fall correctly

      Probably not. The "best" way I can imagine landing would be to land in a standing position, with your knees locked. You are hoping that the impact energy will be absorbed in your lower body instead of your internal organs, spine, and brain.

      Upon landing, the bones in your legs would shatter, the flesh of your legs would be pulverized, and your lower body would basically explode like a blood-filled water balloon. Even if this all happened correctly, there is still the matter of decelerating your upper body.

      The equation we need here is v^2=2ax. We are solving for a. Suppose v is 120 mph, and x is three feet (the typical length of a person's legs). The acceleration would be about 1600 m/s^2: 163 G's. This would turn your brain to mush.

      Now, some people theorize that instead of just impacting into the ground, you could land at an angle and "roll" in order to transfer the kinetic energy into a harmless direction. Except that if you think about this physically, it's even worse than just impacting directly into the ground. Now, instead of removing your momentum of fall, you have to redirect it to a perpendicular direction. This takes 40% more force than simply stopping the motion, and would probably result in your entire body exploding like a water balloon, not just your legs.

      Without something to substantially cushion the fall, I do not believe it is possible for a human to survive an impact on a hard surface at terminal velocity.

  5. Why is it so hard to beleive? by true_majik · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You guys are very quick at pointing out how ridiculous this idea sounds. Have you guys seen fotage of the wingsuit in use? It's pretty impressive. Why is it totally impossible to take it a step further? Don't you think that before the wingsuit, people were ridiculing it? And the parachute too? And the airplane? I'm not saying it's a sure thing, but it may very well be possible to land safely with a wingsuit.

  6. Re:There is a reason by EastCoastSurfer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's funny because I was curious and ran the numbers on % of deaths for cars and for sky diving.

    In 2003 there were 42,643 traffic deaths in the US. Using the estimated population numbers from the CIA website that came to roughly .014% chance to die in a car accident.

    Using the latest sky diving death numbers of 25(the last time they reported) and dividing by the only number I could find as to how many jumped (members of the USPA). It came to a .074% chance of death by sky diving. The only problem with the number is that I couldn't find how many people actually did jump last year and had to go off members in the association.

    A better stat would be deaths/divided by number of attempts/trips. I wonder if anyone keeps accurate counts of all sky dives and if someone has any figures around number of car trips taken per year.

    Another thing I wonder about is do the sky dive deaths include base jumping? IMHO, I would agree with you about base jumping being very stupid to do on a regular basis. An acquaintance of mine died doing a base jump when a gust of wind pushed her back into the mountain. She was a pro sky diver(doing competitions and stuff) so it was more bad luck than anything that got her. Knowing what happened to her, I still think people should try a tandem jump at least once in their life. It is truly an amazing experience.