Closer to Human Flight

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)."

Comments

landing

[confusion]

They say they're dealing with it, but I really have to wonder how they slow to a resonable speed to land. It seems to me that the "pilot" would be moving at a good clip most of the time. Maybe they have a way to modify the aerodymanics of the wings to slow down + add lots of lift, like flaps on an airplane.
Cool stuff, though. I won't be trying it.

Jerry
http://www.syslog.org/

There is a reason

[harks]

why most famous BASE jumpers are dead. This is it. Unless he's got some secret technology nobody knows about, this is likely suicide. It's also not good for the public image of skydiving when sombody dies like this.

Re:There is a reason

[Golias]

Doing a single tandem jump, because you want to say you did it once, is one thing. Lots of people are curious enough to give it a try.

I'm talking about people who keep jumping on a regular basis. Sooner or later, 00 is going to come up on that Roulette wheel, and the more times you play, the more likely you will eventually hit it.

People like to say "you are more likely to die in a car than in a plane", because lots more people die in car crashes than in plane crashes, but if you spent several hours a day flying in planes, the odds of you getting killed in a plane crash become much, much higher. How many touring rock stars died in car crashes in the last 20 years? How many in planes and helicopters?

Skydiving is a high risk activity. If I learn how to do beam gymnastics and get really good at it, I could probably do a beam routine over a pit of lava once and not die. Gymnasts don't fall off the beam very often. However, if I keep doing it on a regular bases, I should expect to get killed doing it sooner or later. Anybody witnessing my behavior would have to assume that I'm some kind of nut to keep pushing my luck like that.

One nasty gust and he's history.

[Synapsys]

I'm no expert in aerodynamics or atmospheric dynamics, but don't you take a huge risk with that (apart from the obvious things) with the help of a nasty gust, updraft or the like, an un recoverable spin could occur.... The problem with having a set of wings and no engine is once you our out of control, recovery won't be easy.

suggestion

[beaverfever]

I'm sure these guys know what they're doing and are figuring out the equations, but here's a suggestion I would like to make: try landing in the suit near the edge of a big cliff, like perhaps near the Grand Canyon, for example. If Jeb gets very low and doesn't like his chances, he could try his damndest to pull up and clear the cliff edge, giving him another chance to release his parachute.

On the other hand, if he did pass the point of no return and went for the landing and overshot a bit, that might be a problem. hmmm.

Water - try landing on water first. Or a mattress - king-size, preferably.

"no one has..survived a landing without a chute"

[CdBee]

Not strictly true - the following is one of several true stories of WW2 bomber crew jumping without chutes and surviving.. in this case because he landed on a glass-roofed railwsy station and was slowed by successive levels of shattering glass

Man Survived 22,000-Foot Fall Out of Bomber

Also:
"The greatest fall without "riding" a piece of wreckage goes to Russian Lt. I.M. Chisov, who bailed out of his Ilyushin 4 bomber at 22,000 feet in January 1942, after being attacked by German fighters. His plan was to free-fall to 1,000 feet before opening his parachute, thus limiting his exposure to enemy fire while still in the air. Unfortunately he lost consciousness on the way down, and never opened his parachute. Like Vulovic, he landed in snow and survived, returning to duty three months later". - link

There was also a British gunner from a Lancaster bomber who fell from his aircraft during an attack and was saved by fir trees and deep snow.

That said, I still think this guy's a loon. Nobody ever volunteered to jump without a parachute before.

Re:Closer?

[the_mind_]

No they don't!

article text

[hyfe]

If you don't know the current abilities of parachutes, now-a-day, you should do your research.

Why? I couldn't care less about the abillties of current parachutes.

Re:Speed is good

[luguvalium2]

Isn't a flare essentially a stall that is really close to the ground? If you watch birds land they flare and then pop their feet out of the tuck position so that they land on their feet. My guess is that with practice, a human can do the same. It's surviving the practice thats the tricky part.

This link supports what you're saying.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:WOwb89dacVQJ: www.basejump.org/discus/articles/family.html+%22BA SE+jumpers%22+dead&hl=en&client=firefox-a

He uses a nitpick statistic of only one *Australian* death in Australia and then death by car but is betrayed by the rest of his talk and familiarity with the problem of dealing with dead base jumpers. That and the point of the page is a howto on getting rid of evidence when a jumper dies. Doth protest too much!

Re:"no one has..survived a landing without a chute

[some guy I know]

Nobody ever volunteered to jump without a parachute before.

That's not true, either.
I remember seeing a video once of a Hollywood stuntman who jumped out of an airplane without a parachute or "flying suit", and landed on an airbag (not the car kind; the kind that Hollywood stuntmen use for falling-from-a-great-height stunts).

I think that there also have been several cases where a stuntman jumped out of an airplane without a parachute, another stuntman handed him a parachute in mid-air, and the first stuntman put it on and deployed it before reaching the ground.
(One James Bond movie (with Roger Moore as Bond) started with Bond fighting in mid-air with a bad guy and taking his parachute.
I think that this was one of those cases.)

Re:"no one has..survived a landing without a chute

[CdBee]

Lieutenant Chisov survived mainly through being unconscious - he landed on the side of an extremely steep ravine filled with snow several feet deep and slid through the snow all the way to the bottom, where he awoke with serious bruises, a few fractures and presumably a sense of bewilderment. The British gunner survived in near-identical circumstances but was totally unhurt. The Germans refused to believe his story....

Re:"no one has..survived a landing without a chute

[Matts]

It all comes down to how much you can move an object. When you hit water the object has to move sideways to get out of your way. This is much harder to achieve than moving something down (i.e. by breaking glass) plus the glass will weigh a hell of a lot less than a few hundred meters of water going straight down, so the opposing force is a lot less.

By breaking several layers of glass one by one you slow the body down with a succession of small forces rather than one big one.

Re:surviving falls

[zeux]

A couple of them survived a landing attempt without a parachute:
- Chissov from russia (1942) fell from 6705 meters (20000 feets) on snow, he was wounded but survived.
- Nicolas Stephen Alkemade (1944) survived a fall from 5490 meters (16500 feets). He landed on a tree and a pile of snow and survived.

I only have a document in French though:
Click here.

Re:Speed is good

[delcielo]

Most flares result in touchdown before a stall occurs, though at least in light planes a stalled landing is considered a good one. It requires keeping the airplane inches above the ground while the Angle of Attack increases to the stall point and drops the airplane gently on the runway.

The term "Angle of Attack" is defined as the angle between the chord line of the wing (a line drawn from the leading edge to the trailing edge) and the relative wind, which is essentially your direction of travel through the air. So for instance, during the landing flare the wing's chord line is pointed up with the rest of the plane but the airplane continues a slight descent, making the angle between the two very large compared to cruise flight where they're both pointed more toward what land-lubbers would call level.

The trick is that as the Angle of Attack increases so does lift... to a point. Every airfoil has a critical angle of attack beyond which airflow separates, lift is destroyed, and the airfoil ceases to work aerodynamically and becomes simply an object sticking out into the wind.

I would imagine that this guy will have to build a great deal of forward speed which will give him a flatter trajectory and therefore a lower angle of attack. He'll then need to raise his angle of attack at the right moment and flare without exceeding that critical angle, which may or may not be anything the engineers who built the suit ever determined. He definety does not want to stall the wingsuit. His life depends on its lift.

I know this guy is doing a lot of testing using gps data, etc. to figure all of this out; but it is exceedingly risky.

I predict this will end bad, though I really hope I'm wrong.

Re:"no one has..survived a landing without a chute

[R2.0]

A friend of mine who was in the military (briefly) told me about "earth angels": soldiers who had survived their chute not opening. Supposedly, they are transferred out of their unit rapidly, not because they don't want to go back up, but their presence creeps out the rest of their unit.

Anyone care to confirm?

Land a Snowboard...

[ayjay29]

I heard about a French guy once, who had done the math, and worked out that free-falling with a snowboard is pretty close to the speed and direction of the guys hopping off the 80m ski jumps.

He had a plan to jump from a helicopter, and land on a steep powder field in the Alps somewhere. I think around the time (1994), the record for the highest survived drop on skiis or a board was around 270 feet.

Never heard if he pulled it off or not.

(I heard all this over a few beers in a bar in Chamonix, so I've no idea if theres any truth behind it.)

One thing i think is cool though, is that the speed skiing record is about 75 mph faster than a free-fall sky diver.