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Flying Humans
mlimber sends us to the NYTimes for a story about flying people who jump from planes or other high locations wearing a wing suit akin to a flying squirrel's. Their efforts have potential military and Xtreme sports applications. The story profiles, with video, one guy who wants to be the first to jump from a plane and land without a parachute (and live). Here's a YouTube video of another of these fliers skimming six feet above skiers in the Swiss Alps. Quoting: "Modern suit design features tightly woven nylon sewn between the legs and between the arms and torso, creating wings that fill with air and create lift, allowing for forward motion and aerial maneuvers while slowing descent. As the suits, which cost about $1,000, have become more sophisticated, so have the pilots. The best fliers, and there are not many, can trace the horizontal contours of cliffs, ridges and mountainsides."
"one guy who wants to be the first to jump from a plane and land without a parachute (and live"
I have some bad news for this idiot. Plenty of people have survived jumping out of planes without parachutes.
Nick Alkemade was an RAF tail gunner in World War II who jumped out of his flaming plane and fell 18,000 feet. He only suffered a sprained leg after he hit a tree and landed in snow.
Vesna Vulovic was a flight attendant who fell out of a plane after an explosion, fell in snow, and survived.
These things have been around for 10 years. Google Birdman Suit or go to any skydiving boogie. Anyone with a D license can demo one.
Who is John Galt?
Patrick was working on developing these winged suits before he died when a rigging error caused his parachute to malfunction. He was planning a way of skiing with one of these suits, so that he could take off and land on the way down. http://www.bpa.org.uk/skydive/pages/people/gayardon.htm
Blue Skies Patrick
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The tricky part of these wingsuits is how to practice enough to get good, without smashing to goo because you're not good enough.
Now there's a solution, that's probably fun enough in itself that many "skydivers" won't ever have to take a risk at all: SkyVenture has wind tunnels set up around the world expressly for simulating skydiving, but without jumping out of a plane. Jumps that last 2-3 minutes, with 45-60 minute setup and plane rides each jump, can now spend hours just "diving" in the chamber.
Maybe once the skills of maneuvering are learned in the tunnel, a suit wearer can tackle the real sport: facing the fear of jumping out of a plane with nothing but a simulator history to save them from smashing to bits.
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make install -not war
There is a much better video of what you can do with one of these suits Here
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Vesna Vulovic, a stewardess for JAT airlines holds the world record for surviving a free fall without a parachute.
My other OS is the MCP!
there was an article in popular science some time ago about these suits, that went into some detail about the physics of it all. The trouble turns out to be, that if you built a suit with enough wing material to give you enough drag to go slow enough to land without a normal 'chute, you'd rip your arms and legs off when you jumped out of the plane. the wings we have at this point are just shy of the maximum size the human body can stand to open mid flight without loosing an appendage. Thus, as it stands now, the current basic design of the suit (wing between the legs, and under each arm to the leg, reverse delta wing style) won't work, and someone has to do some serious design work to come up with an alternate design/materials/technique of flying to create a way to fly, and then finally apply enough drag to land. the way I personally see it (and i am not a physicist ) the solutions may be some sort of imaginary material like in batman that when an electrical charge is applied, it becomes rigid, and has a tensile strength near that of steel, which would allow you to make a suit that became rigid on command. thus, you make the suit, where you launch with small wings, fly, ridgidize the suit, and then cause the wings to expand somehow, giving you enough drag to land, but short of a parachute.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Sorry, here's the TIME story from 1959: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,937849,00.html
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uh, no. Sorry, but you're not going to rip your arms and legs off, and suits are definitely not "just shy of the maximum size the human body can stand". The limiting factor is how long your arms and legs are, and how far apart you can spread them. Anyway, even if you were approaching limb wrenching sizes there's a simple solution: bring your arms and legs in. That's what you have to do now when exiting (at least if you want to avoid the tail of the plane), and when opening your chute so you gain enough speed for it to inflate properly.
Also, you don't need any fancy materials, or "electric charge" to make a rigid suit. They already _are_ rigid, using the same method that parachutes use: airspeed to inflate the cells. Some of them even have airlocks to keep them inflated even if you slow down.
The height at which 50% of the people die from a fall is about 50 feet( actually 4 stories or 48 feet). The Lethal Dose at which 90% of people die (LD 90) is approximately 84 feet , or 7 stories. At least those numbers are what we use in medicine in an urban setting. Falls outside may be cushioned by trees/ bushes,snow, etc and may change the numbers. Obviously there exists anecdotal evidence of people falling 5 feet and dieing and people who fell 20,000 feet and lived, but statistically those are the numbers collected by medical literature.
You hit the ground at about 35-36 MPH from a 48 foot fall, at 84 feet - about 50 MPH. Actually speeds are a little bit smaller,since I didn't takeinto account the effect of wind resistance and body density, and just used the simple physica acceleration formula V^2 = U^2 + 2AS
I'm an orthopaedic surgeon, and when fall/jump from those heights, putting them back together can be a bit "tricky", and the pieces don't always go back together well. When the suicide jumper only jumps from 40 feet and lives with horrible fractures, we sometimes joke that they didn't read the literature and plan things out correctly. Now the person is depressed AND may have bad arthritic pain from their smashed joints now, or just be plain old paralyzed.
Life sucks.....and then you live.
..........FULL STOP.